Transforming Fragile Hydrogel Chips Into Standardized Cartridges via Contact Line Pinning for Robust Microfluidics.

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Materials Science

Background:

• Hydrogel microfluidic chips offer potential in drug delivery, tissue engineering, and biosensing.
• Challenges exist in hydrogel chip implementation due to fragility and wet properties, limiting their use as testing platforms.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel approach for transforming fragile hydrogel microfluidic chips into user-friendly, mass-producible cartridges.
• To address limitations in hydrogel chip connectivity and enhance their practical application.

Main Methods:

• A hydrogel-plastic bonding scheme was employed to provide mechanical support to the hydrogel chip.
• A contactless connection method was integrated for tubing-free chip-to-world interfacing, allowing for a gap width tolerance of 60-600 µm and fluid pressures up to 9.5 kPa.

Main Results:

• The novel cartridge design successfully transformed hydrogel chips into low-cost, convenient, and mass-producible units.
• Demonstrated successful applications in antibiotic susceptibility tests and 2D cell culture experiments.
• The contactless connection method proved robust within specified tolerances for gap width and fluid pressure.

Conclusions:

• The developed hydrogel-plastic bonding and contactless connection method offers a viable and accessible solution for hydrogel-based microfluidic chips.
• This innovation significantly enhances the usability and applicability of hydrogel chips across various biomedical fields.
• The cartridge format facilitates broader adoption of microfluidic technologies in research and diagnostics.