Automating micro cellular detection process using all-transparent microfluidic platform and surface plasmon resonance technique

This paper reports an automated polymer based microfluidic analysis system integrated with the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensor for qualitatively monitoring of cell adhesion on the sensor surface. Micropumps, microchannels, and SPR biosensor were integrated into a single polymer (PMMA) based microfluidic system. The integrated system has been studied in its potential application in drugs discovery. An experiment, which is monitoring the activities of living cells in the presence or absence of trypsin in RPMI-1640 medium, was conducted to show the ability of its biomedical application. Because SPR based bio-detection requires optically transparent substrates, PMMA is a potential replacement for glass and silicon-glass in microfluidic systems, if biocompatibility and low-cost are desired. Hence, our work has shown the feasibility of commercializing SPR based biomedical/chemical analyses system in the near future. Furthermore, an advanced 2-dimensional multi-chamber microfluidic system with the SPR imaging detection system for detecting the specific binding of biomolecules was also conduced. It shows the possibility of the parallel detection process.