Engineered biopolymeric membranes for residual cell trapping on microfluidic blood plasma separation systems.

In the last decade there was a growing attention in biopolymeric porous structures for advanced applications ranging from environment to bioengineering. The developments in this field led to the optimization of processes for membranes preparation enabling high control of porosity and pore structures and widening the potential applications of these materials also to biomedical microfluidic devices. One of the most interesting application of biomedical micro-scale devices concern the biomarker detection directly from whole blood samples. These systems could allow clinical diagnostics that requires challenging limit-of-detection for low abundance target molecules in plasma. So far, micro-scale blood plasma separation (BPS) allowed achieving remarkable results in terms of plasma yield or purity, but rarely achieving both at the same time.
The seminar will be focused on a novel microfluidic device for continuous blood plasma separation based on Poly-Lactic-Acid (PLA) membranes presenting microporous or nanofibrous structures to be used as optimization of hydrodynamic blood plasma separation units. Blood plasma separation efficiency and pressure drop across membranes were evaluated with plasma-diluted blood corresponding to output-plasma tested from already existing hydrodynamic BPS system and it was compared with commercially available membranes for BPS. Results highlighted that PLA electrospun membranes are suitable as downstream residual cell removal from blood permitting to collect up to 2 ml of low-hemolyzed and RBCs-free plasma. Qbit revealed that ES membranes did not affect significantly the concentration of DNA. PLA-based electrospun membranes can be combined with hydrodynamic blood plasma separation in order to achieve challenging results in terms of plasma yield and purity.