We present a high-throughput roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing process for foil-based polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) chips of excellent optical quality. These disposable, R2R hot embossed microfluidic chips are used for the identification of the antibiotic resistance gene mecA in Staphylococcus epidermidis. R2R hot embossing is an emerging manufacturing technology for polymer microfluidic devices. It is based on continuous feeding of a thermoplastic foil through a pressurized area between a heated embossing cylinder and a blank counter cylinder. Although mass fabrication of foil-based microfluidic chips and their use for biological applications were foreseen already some years ago, no such studies have been published previously.

Inertial microfluidics has been a highly active area of research in recent years for high-throughput focusing and sorting of synthetic and biological microparticles. However, existing inertial microfluidic devices always rely on microchannels with high-aspect-ratio geometries (channel width w < channel height h) and small cross-sections (w×h < 50 × 100 μm(2)). Such deep and small structures increase fabrication difficulty and can limit manufacturing by large-scale and high-throughput production approaches such as roll-to-roll (R2R) hot embossing. In this work, we present a novel inertial microfluidic device using only a simple and low-aspect-ratio (LAR) straight microchannel (w > h) to achieve size-based sorting of microparticles and cells. The simple LAR geometry of the device enables successful high-throughput fabrication using R2R hot embossing. With optimized flow conditions and channel dimensions, we demonstrate continuous sorting of a mixture of 15 μm and 10 μm diameter microbeads with >97% sorting efficiency using the low-cost and disposable R2R chip. We further demonstrate size-based sorting of bovine white blood cells, demonstrating the ability to process real cellular samples in our R2R chip. We envision that this R2R hot-embossed inertial microfluidic chip will serve as a powerful yet low-cost and disposable tool for size-based sorting of synthetic microparticles in industrial applications or cellular samples in cell biology research and clinical diagnostics.

The unique antiwetting properties of superhydrophobic (SH) surfaces prevent the adhesion of water and bodily fluids, including blood, urine, and saliva. While typical manufacturable approaches to create SH surfaces rely on chemical and structural modifications, such approaches are expensive, require postprocessing, and are often not biocompatible. By contrast, it is demonstrated that purely structural SH features are easily formed using high throughput roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing by shrinking a prestressed thermoplastic with a thin, stiff layer of silver and calcium. These features are subsequently embossed into any commercially available and Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved plastic. The R2R SH surfaces have contact angles >150° and contact angle hysteresis <10°. Importantly, the surfaces minimize blood adhesion, leading to reduced blood coagulation without the need for anticoagulants. SH surfaces have >4200× reduction of blood residue area compared to the nonstructured controls of the same material. In addition, blood clotting is reduced >5× using whole blood directly from the patient. Furthermore, these surfaces can be easily configured into 3D shapes, as demonstrated with SH tubes. With the simple scale-up production and the eliminated need for anticoagulants to prevent clotting, the proposed conformable SH surfaces can be impactful for a wide range of medical tools, including catheters and microfluidic channels.

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