3D-Printed Microfluidics and Potential Biomedical Applications

Abstract

3D printing is a smart additive manufacturing technique that allows the engineering of biomedical devices that are usually difficult to design using conventional methodologies such as machining or molding. Nowadays, 3D-printed microfluidics has gained enormous attention due to their various advantages including fast production, cost-effectiveness, and accurate designing of a range of products even geometrically complex devices. In this review, we focused on the recent significant findings in the field of 3D-printed microfluidic devices for biomedical applications. 3D printers are used as fabrication tools for a broad variety of systems for a range of applications like diagnostic microfluidic chips to detect different analytes, for example, glucose, lactate, and glutamate and the biomarkers related to different clinically relevant diseases, for example, malaria, prostate cancer, and breast cancer. 3D printers can print various materials (inorganic and polymers) with varying density, strength, and chemical properties that provide users with a broad variety of strategic options. In this article, we have discussed potential 3D printing techniques for the fabrication of microfluidic devices that are suitable for biomedical applications. Emerging diagnostic technologies using 3D printing as a method for integrating living cells or biomaterials into 3D printing are also reviewed.

Perspectives in translating microfluidic devices from laboratory prototyping into scale-up production

“…3D printing has gained much attention recently, especially for the early-stage development of microfluidic devices due to cost-effectiveness, capability for complex structures, and short fabrication time. A variety of techniques have been exploited based on 3D printing, such as fused deposition modeling (FDM), stereolithography, digital light processing (DLP), Polyjet 3D printing, 61 and two-photon polymerization (2PP).…”

Fabrication of Polymer Microfluidics: An Overview

“…Moreover, robust connection ports and complex flow regulating components can be constructed, and the integration of detectors and cell culture on chips can be achieved [ 101 ]. Because of these features, several issues related to conventional techniques could be resolved—for example, expensive and time-consuming processes when changing the device designs and difficulty in transitioning from prototyping fabrication to bulk manufacturing [ 102 , 103 , 104 , 105 ]. There are different ways to realize 3D printing, such as stereolithography (SL) [ 106 ], selective laser melting and sintering (SLS), fused deposition modeling (FDM), and polyjet or multi-jet modeling (MJM), as shown in Figure 7 .…”

Micro/Nanofluidic‐Enabled Biomedical Devices: Integration of Structural Design and Manufacturing

“…[ 71 ] The LOM technique is easy to use, cheap, fast, and can handle relatively large size objects. [ 72 ] Figure 5E shows a printing method without the need for sacrificial materials by precisely extruding inks into self‐supporting microchannels. [ 73 ] Removal of sacrificial materials allows for a reduced postprocessing time, and microfluidic structures such as pumps, mixers, and channels can be directly aligned onto substrates.…”