Development of microfluidic tools for point-of-care pregnancy monitoring

During pregnancy traces of fetal DNA are present in maternal blood. This cell-free DNA (cfDNA) can be isolated and analysed allowing for safe genetic diagnostics of the fetus, Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT), even as early as 7-8 weeks of gestation. However, due to the complex nature of blood processing and the abundance of maternal background DNA NIPT currently requires expensive and time consuming procedures, while still being prone to diagnostic errors. The aim of this project is to develop alternative approach to blood sample processing and fetal DNA recovery with the use of microfluidics. The starting point is the blood plasma separation (BPS) microfluidic chip created in our group, which was shown to provide plasma with highly decreased maternal DNA content compared to the standard separation method (centrifugation). As this potentially allows for increasing the accuracy of the tests, we focused on developing an experimental procedure for studying DNA behaviour and the mechanism of its selective retrieval in the microfluidic BPS device. An evaluation of this approach and the future directions will be presented.