Abstract
In the past decade, microfabrication of miniature fluidic devices has attracted considerable interest and made substantial impacts. One of the most promising applications is for biomedical applications. In this talk, several bio-sensing chips using the enabling microfluidic technology incorporate with magnetic beads will be presented. Functional microfluidic devices/systems have beenintegrated to perform fast diagnosis in an automatic format. Taking advatage of the specific interaction between the antibody on the surface of the magnetic breads and the surface antigen on the viruses or bacteria, the target viruses and bacteria can be recognized and further purified by a magnetic field. The purified virus and bacteria were then lysed to release RNA or DNA for the subsequent RT-PCR processes. Results show that the target viruses/bacteria can be purified and concentrated successfully by the high specificity and selectivity of antibody-conjugated magnetic beads, and the subsequent amplification of RNA/DNA can be completed automatically utilizing the on-chip micro heaters. The high mixing efficiency of the two-way s-pump and the reapid heating/cooling rate of the micro heaters can make the pretreatment and diagnosis processes in a shorter period of time. As a whole, the developed system may provide a powerful platform for sample pretreatment and fast diseases diagnosis.