CAPSYS · Capillary systems for advanced point-of-care diagnostics

Capillary systems for advanced point-of-care diagnostics

In 2017, the global in vitro diagnostic (IVD) market was valued at $64 billions with an estimated annual growth rate of 4.8% from 2018 to 2025. Point-of-care (POC) diagnostic tests represent at least 36% of the IVD market and are performed by medical professionals or directly by the patients themselves. Even though there are already many POC diagnostic tests available on the market, several important needs for portable diagnostics are still unmet: POC tests still require a relatively large volumes of samples, often lack sensitivity and accuracy and cannot be readily multiplexed. In addition, there are opportunities to adapt POC diagnostics for better connectivity in the context of mobile health and to make them wearable. CAPSYS will have a double impact on society. On the one hand the results obtained from this synergetic research work will contribute to push the current state of the art of POC technologies by combining advanced capillary-driven microfluidic chips with innovative bioassay architectures (Fig. 1). On the other hand, CAPSYS provided a unique multidisciplinary education to two Early Stage Researchers (ESRs). In addition to high quality technical work, the ESRs were exposed to the process of IP generation and discussion with companies and potential partners. This real-world research environment trained and inspired the ESRs, who acquired skills beyond academic research and have now competences for becoming the next generation of entrepreneurs in Europe. The overall objective of CAPSYS is to push the state-of-the-art technology in POC diagnostics by taking advantage of the physics of liquids at the microscale. Two distinct but complementary projects were led by two PhD students: ESR1 and ESR2. In these projects ESR1 and ESR2 designed and fabricated capillary-driven microfluidic chips in order to perform bioassays with very small volumes of sample and reagents and with controlled assay kinetics. In particular, capillary-driven microfluidic chips allow to program the flow rate of liquids by design, integrate and resuspend reagents precisely on chip, and perform a sequence of steps automatically. This multidisciplinary industrial and academic project will contribute to improve rapid testing and will impact the field of diagnostics, medicine and technology.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union