Microfluidic technologies offer new platforms for biosensing in various clinical and point-of-care (POC) applications. Currently, at the clinical settings, the gold standard diagnostic platforms for multiplexed sensing are multi-step, time consuming, requiring expensive and bulky instruments with a constant need of electricity which makes them unsuitable for resource-limited or POC settings. These technologies are often limited by logistics, costly assays and regular maintenance. Although there have been several attempts to miniaturize these diagnostic platforms, they stand short of batch fabrication and they are dependent on complementary components such as syringe pumps. Here, we demonstrated the development and clinical testing of a disposable, multiplexed sensing device (ToMMx), which is a portable, high-throughput and user-friendly microfluidic platform. It was built with inexpensive plastic materials and operated manually without requiring electrical power and extensive training. We validated this platform in a small cohort of 50 clinical samples from patients with cardiovascular diseases and healthy controls. The platform is rapid and gives quantifiable results with high sensitivity, as low as 5.29 pg/mL, from only a small sample volume (4 μL). ToMMx platform was compared side-by-side with commercial ELISA kits where the total assay time is reduced 15-fold, from 5 h to 20 min. This technology platform is broadly applicable to various diseases with well-known biomarkers in diagnostics and monitoring, especially with potential future impact at the POC settings.
Keywords: Cardiovascular biomarkers; Microfluidics; Multiplexed sensing; On-chip manual biosensing.
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