Microfluidic Development Service for Biomarker Detection

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Early and timely detection of biomarkers can accelerate the diagnosis of severe diseases (e.g. cancers) and prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Because conventional approaches (e.g. polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and immunoassays) have limited application in low-resource settings, simple and costly point-of-care (POC) equipment for appropriate biomarker diagnosis is required. Remarkably, microfluidic technology possesses prominent features for easy, rapid, and inexpensive biomarker detection. As a service provider in microfluidic solutions, Creative Biolabs focuses on the recent advances of biomarker identification using microfluidic techniques for basic research or clinical diagnosis. Our experts have developed rapidly adaptable lab-on-chip platforms to support the low-cost and straightforward measurement of biomarkers and allow the limited volumes of samples to be analyzed on chip-scale devices with fluidic microchannels.

Why Biomarkers Detection is important?

When a disease attacks a person, there are biological signals that represent the physiological and pathological state of the changes in response to the status of the disease. Biomarkers have been described as characteristics, most often molecular, that are objectively determined and evaluated as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes, pharmacological response to therapeutic effectiveness or any measurable indicator to monitor the risk or presence of a specific disease. These molecules comprise circulating DNA and tumor cells, mRNA expression profiles, proteins, proteomic patterns, lipids, metabolites, and electrical signals. And They may be obtained from materials such as blood, urine, or tissues. Disease biomarker detection that is supposed to be precise, relatively noninvasive, and easy to operate, even in POC settings, could improve the screening, diagnosis, recovery, and prognosis on the treatment of different diseases.

Case Study

In the previous study, a quantitative method is shown to identify 10 immunological biomarkers in the same tumor cut section, which saves valuable samples and enables correlative analysis on a number of cell families and their activation status in a tumor microenvironment background. A microfluidic chip has been designed and fabricated to possess optimized thermomechanical and optical properties for the fast delivery of reagents on tissue slides and for fully automatic imaging by integrated with an optical microscope. The multiplexing competence of the system is guaranteed by an optimal cyclic immunofluorescence protocol, with which quantitative sequential immunostaining of up to 10 biomarkers can be performed on the same tissue section. Thanks to the quantitativeness and the automation of both the experimental and analytical methods, this multiplexing approach using microfluidic chip systems would meet the growing clinical need of personalized diagnostics and therapeutics in cancer pathology.

Fig. 1 Biomarker detection on microfluidic. Fig. 1 Microfluidic biomarker detection.1,3

Biomarker Detection Services at Creative Biolabs

Biomarkers are highly valuable for both basic and clinical research and promote diagnosis, prognosis, evaluation of disease stage, importantly, prediction of suitable candidates for specific treatments. Microfluidic chips bring about two unique opportunities to the field of biomarkers. On the one hand, they can address some of the developmental obstacles, and on the other hand, they can provide sophisticated platforms to bridge the gap between biomarker studies and biomarker-based analytical device market. In reality, the adoption of microfluidics has created a novel avenue for the advancement, facilitating clinical utilization of biomarkers and their analytical systems. At Creative Biolabs, we have developed powerful microfluidic platforms for biomedical applications and would like to help clients design ideal microfluidic chips with outstanding advantages.

As a top-ranking provider in the microfluidic market, Creative Biolabs is dedicated to learning the recent fabrication techniques and offers several common microfluidic techniques to assess biomarkers. Our facilities support on-chip POC diagnosis and real-time monitoring of diseases from a very small amount of body fluids. Because of all these significant properties, multiple microfluidic chips have been implemented for biomarker detection in disease diagnosis, including various types of cancers (e.g. colorectal cancer, hepatocellular cancer, ovarian cancer, and prostate cancer), various types of infectious diseases (e.g. food-borne pathogen, Hepatitis B, meningitis, and dengue virus), and other diseases (e.g. cardiovascular and Alzheimer’s diseases). And these microfluidic platforms including but not limited to:

If you want to know more about our customized microfluidic chip services, please directly contact us or send an e-mail with your specific requests.

Published Data

The findings highlighted in the articles related to biomarker detection using a microfluidic chip are presented here:

1. Multiplexed biomarker detection aided by microfluidics for the in situ localization of immune cells within tumor sections.

Fig. 3 Expression analysis on lung adenocarcinoma.Fig. 3 Expression analysis on lung adenocarcinoma: T-cell phenotyping.2,3

In recent years, immunotherapy has become a promising cancer treatment method, and obtaining relevant information about immune cells in the tumor site is crucial for treatment. Daniel Migliozzi et al. demonstrated a microfluidic chip that can quantitatively identify multiple different immune markers in the same tumor slice sample.2,3 The chip is made from COC material, which has great mechanical properties. The COC chip is combined with a glass cover slip to allow direct imaging after each step. Experiments have shown that this chip can identify markers in lung cancer slices, including CD4, CD8, CD3 + cells and FOXP3.

References

  1. Park, Son, et al. " High-Throughput Microfluidic 3D Cytotoxicity Assay for Cancer Immunotherapy (CACI-IMPACT Platform)." Frontiers in Immunology 10 (2019): 1133.
  2. Migliozzi, Daniel, et al. "Microfluidics-assisted multiplexed biomarker detection for in situ mapping of immune cells in tumor sections." Microsystems & nanoengineering 5.1 (2019): 59.
  3. Distributed under Open Access license CC BY 4.0, without modification.

For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use.

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