Glass Microfluidic Chip For Blood Analysis

Microfluidic chips have taken the advantages of small sample volume, low cost, short assay time, high intergration level, and have the potential application in chemical and biological analysis, environmental monitoring, clinic diagnoses and so on. As a usual clinical method, blood analysis is very important in disease diagnoses and therapy. Thus, it has been attracted wide attentions. This thesis aimed to develop the microfluidic chips for the analysis of blood, which is meaningful for the development of new microfluidic technologies and blood assays. The thesis is composed of three major parts:In the first part, an inter-channel microfluidic device for continuous rapid lysis of red blood cells (RBCs) has been developed by employing a selective lysis buffer. The device consists of two parallel micro-channels with many filters between them which can prevent cells passing through. With controlled flow rates, the fresh NH4Cl-lysis buffer in one channel can be injected into the blood channel through filters for the lysis of RBCs and separation of white blood cells (WBCs). Compared with"Y"-type microfluidic device, rapid lysis of RBCs and high-efficiency recovery of WBCs can be achieved with this inter-channel device. This device has shown its advantages, such as simplicity, rapid procedures, little sample concuming, and preliminary-process-free. Therefore, it is available for integrating with other elements of microfluidic chips for further application.In the second part, based on the adsorption of red blood cells (RBC) in the filters of inter-channel chip, a microfludic method was established for the study of deformability of RBCs. RBCs can be adsorbed in the filters for its good deformability, and different deformability of RBCs resulted in the different numbers of adsorbed cells. Thus, RBCs deformability can be measured through simple calculating the adsorbed cells in filters. This inter-channel chip can be operated simply, rapidly, and without pretreatment of blood. Therefore, this microfluidic chip also has the potential possibility to integrate with other elements of microfluidic chips for blood analysis.In the third part, based on the platform of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic chips in our team, we explored the fabrication technologies of glass microfluidic chips. The effects of different resolution of masks and the fabricated chips have been investigated. And the dimensions of microfluidic structure were measured by using PDMS replication. It has shown that the masks printed with 3657-dpi-resolution can be used for fabricating of microfluidic chips which channel wide is larger than 30μm. The deformability of RBCs with different flow rates was investigated using this microfluidic chip. It indicated that the basic fabrication technologies of glass chips have been developed, which provided the fundational approaches for further application of microfluidic chips.