Advances in Reagents Storage and Release in Self‐Contained Point‐of‐Care Devices

Abstract

Microfluidics has emerged as a useful material for point‐of‐care testing. However, conventional microfluidic devices rely on multiple steps to complete the detection process, which may not be acceptable for untrained users. The emerging “self‐contained” point‐of‐care devices, with all necessary reagents prestored in, address this limitation. This paper summarizes the recent advances of self‐contained point‐of‐care devices, with emphasis on the approaches for reagents integration and manipulation. Due to the intrinsic similarity and relevance of these approaches in pharmaceutical applications, several examples about drug delivery in vivo are presented. Different approaches are compared and future trends for the development of self‐contained point‐of‐care devices are outlined.

Microbial Analysis of Saliva to Identify Oral Diseases Using a Point-of-Care Compatible qPCR Assay

“…The overall goal was to develop a POC compatible dual color qPCR that can be easily integrated into microfluidic based diagnostic platforms [ 21 ]. Point-of-care assay demands, applicable also for this study have been previously defined in work related to POC integration [ 22 ].…”

Microfluidics for Biomedical Analysis

“…Even though microfluidic platforms are regarded as the best candidate for POC diagnosis, there are a lot of barriers that prevent the translation of these techniques from the laboratory to clinic and other real‐world applications. A fully integrated POC platform includes surface modification and immobilization, sample pre‐treatment, reagent transportation, temperature control, reagent/buffer storage, signal acquisition and amplification, and data analysis . Although each component and procedure have been well developed, the full integration of these functionalities into a compact unit is not as easy as it seems.…”

Programmable Paper-Based Microfluidic Devices for Biomarker Detections

“…However, the flow of fluid in the p-CMF channel is weak and decreases with time. Because the surface of paper can be easily modified for chemical binding, p-CMF devices are commonly used for immobilizing enzymes, antibodies, and chemical reagents for chemical and biological assays [29].…”

“…As analytical platforms, paper-based microfluidic devices are commonly used to transport fluid samples and to store chemical reagents for the colorimetric and electrochemical detection of target analytes [29,30,31,32]. The traditional p-CMF is limited by low sensitivity and by difficulty in achieving multi-step assays with automatic processes [25].…”