Encapsulation Services
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Creative Biolabs has long-lasting expertise in the design and production of microfluidic chips for a broad range of project objectives. Microfluidic technology can deal with the movement of small volumes of fluids in capillaries of several hundred or tens of micrometers in diameter. In the last decade, microfluidic-based encapsulation has advanced significantly in different applications, especially drug discovery and delivery.
Fig. 1 Cell encapsulation on chip. 1,2
Microfluidic-based cell encapsulation presents a powerful tool for information collection over large populations of cells. Compared with the traditional flow cytometry (FC) or fluorescence-activated cell sorter (FACS), the microfluidic devices enable the encapsulation, incubation, and manipulation of individual cells in picoliter aqueous at rates of up to several hundred Hz. And the restricted drop volume allows the secreted molecules to attain detectable concentrations rapidly.
Maintenance of drug concentration in the bloodstream or tissue is the crucial factor for drug formulation and drug dosage determination. Protein encapsulation in a micro- or nanocarrier achieves a constant release rate over time for protein drugs. Using the double emulsion technique and a water-in-oil-in-water (w/o/w) emulsion generated from a microfluidic system, the encapsulation efficiency can be further improved.
Enzyme encapsulation is the process that a small membrane entrapped inside the vector to allow the substrates and other small molecules to pass through but retains the enzyme. To avoid the potential limitations of traditional enzyme encapsulation, microfluidic technologies have been widely used in enzyme encapsulation with a series of advantages, such as low energy consumption, high efficiency, rapid heat exchange, fast mass transfer, and superior repeatability.
Bacteria encapsulation is an effective method to protect bacteria against severe environmental factors. For probiotic bacteria, probiotics encapsulation presents significant advantages compared with free probiotics, such as longer storage time, easy transport, and high survival rate.
A droplet microfluidic device is an ideal reactor to rapidly execute complex workflows involving multiple steps. The established high-throughput droplet-based microfluidic platform has been used for the screening of surface epitopes of single HIV particles. In this system, HIV was encapsulated individually in droplets, together with a fluorogenic substrate for alkaline phosphatase (AP).
In recent years, microbiomes exert a significant influence on human health and diseases. Microfluidic technology has been widely used in microbiome research, such as single-cell culture, whole-genome sequencing (WGS), gene expression, and metabolic analyses. There is a microfluidic device for encapsulating and co-cultivating subsets of a microbial community in monodispersed droplets, which can be used to discover synergistic interactions among microbes and mimic various compositions of natural microbial communities.
Active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) are the active ingredients in medications, carried by the excipient. Recent studies have shown the potential benefits brought by microfluidic tools to the formulation of polymeric nanoparticles loaded with APIs. Microfluidic-based API encapsulation has been used in both lipid-based systems for encapsulating oligonucleotides forming lipoplexes and polymer nanocarrier for encapsulating the antitumor agent with potential surface modification towards active targeting.
Fig 2. A microfluidic device for microbial co-cultivation.1,2
Advantages of Microfluidic-based Encapsulation
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Improved encapsulation efficiency
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High-through and low-cost encapsulation
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Great reproducibility
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Fully customizable experimental design to expand beyond standard procedure
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Simple, quick, and reliable encapsulation procedure
Creative Biolabs offers a suite of custom microfluidic chip development services to address the ever-changing research of microfluidic devices. Equipped with years of experience and advanced platforms, we can offer a series of encapsulation services for our customs all over the world. If you are interested in our services, please do not hesitate to contact us for more detailed information.
References
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Park, Kemer, et al. " Microdroplet-Enabled Highly Parallel Co-Cultivation of Microbial Communities " PLOS ONE 1371 (2011): 17019.
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Open Access license CC BY 4.0, without modification.
For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use.
