Blood tests are widely used to diagnose and monitor diseases, medication effectiveness, and organ function. Most analytes reside in the plasma, blood’s liquid component, and the separation of plasma from blood’s solid components typically entails sending blood samples to processing labs for centrifugation. But microfluidics offers the prospect of running tests on location, at low cost, with mere droplets of blood fresh from a pricked finger—by spinning (“lab on a CD”), wicking in ordinary paper, or incorporating filters into “labs on a chip.” Jasmina Casals-Terré (Technical University of Catalonia) and colleagues have now addressed a major hurdle for so-called cross-flow microfluidic filters and greatly improved their efficiency. In the team’s device, blood from an injected drop flows through a narrow, 2-cm-long channel. An electric field applied to the channel helps drive the flow electro-osmotically (see the article by George Whitesides and Abraham Stroock, Physics Today, June 2001, page 42...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
1 November 2015
November 01 2015
Point-of-care blood tests with microfluidics
Physics Today 68 (11), 19 (2015);
Citation
Richard J. Fitzgerald; Point-of-care blood tests with microfluidics. Physics Today 1 November 2015; 68 (11): 19. https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2972
Download citation file:
PERSONAL SUBSCRIPTION
Purchase an annual subscription for $25. A subscription grants you access to all of Physics Today's current and backfile content.
Sign In
You could not be signed in. Please check your credentials and make sure you have an active account and try again.
108
Views
Citing articles via
The lessons learned from ephemeral nuclei
Witold Nazarewicz; Lee G. Sobotka
FYI science policy briefs
Lindsay McKenzie; Jacob Taylor