Versatile hybrid acoustic micromixer with demonstration of circulating cell-free DNA extraction from sub-ml plasma samples
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Versatile hybrid acoustic micromixer with demonstration of circulating cell-free DNA extraction from sub-ml plasma samples
Wed, 19/02/2020 - 14:30 to 15:30
Location:
Speaker:
Alvaro Conde
Synopsis:
Acoustic micromixers have attracted considerable attention in the last years since they can deliver high mixing efficiencies without the need for movable components. However, their adoption in the academic and industrial microfluidics community has been limited possibly owed to the reduced flexibility and accessibility of previous designs since most of them are application-specific and fabricated with techniques that are expensive, not widely available and difficult to integrate with other manufacturing technologies. In this work, we describe a simple, yet highly versatile bubble-based micromixer module fabricated with a combination of low-cost rapid prototyping techniques. The hybrid approach enables the integration of the module into practically any substrate and the individual control of multiple micromixers embedded within the same monolithic chip. The module can operate under static and continuous flow conditions showing enhanced mixing capabilities compared to similar devices. We show that the system is capable of performing cell-free DNA extractions from small volumes of blood plasma (≤500 µl) with up to a ten-fold increase in capture efficiency when compared to control methods.
Biography
Biography:
Dr. Conde received his Engineer’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the National University of Tucumán (Argentina). After graduation, he started a PhD at the same University, focusing on the development of microfluidic technologies for biological applications. During his PhD, Dr. Conde completed a 1-year training at the Technical University of Denmark and also collaborated with several research institutions in Europe and Latin America. After finishing his PhD, he worked as a Research Associate at the National Atomic Energy Commission (Argentina) focusing in the microfluidic-assisted synthesis of nanomedicines. In 2018 he joined the Dr. Kersaudy-Kerhoas’ Clinical Microfluidics Lab where he worked in the engineering of microfluidic devices for the isolation of circulating free DNA from blood. Currently, Dr. Conde is a Visiting Scholar at IB3 where he is working in the integration of a multi-step biological assay into a microfluidic format aimed at the enrichment of circulating tumoral DNA.