Fully integrated microfluidic devices for qualitative, quantitative and digital nucleic acids testing at point of care

Abstract

Benefiting from emerging miniaturized and equipment-free nucleic acid testing (NAT) technologies, fully integrated NAT devices at point of care (POC) with the capability of “sample-in-answer-out” are proceeding at a break-neck speed to eliminate complex operations and reduce the risk of contamination. Like the development of PCR technology (standard technique for NAT), the detection signal of fully integrated NAT devices has evolved from qualitative to quantitative and recently to digital readout, aiming at expanding their extensive applications through gradually improving detection sensitivity and accuracy. This review firstly introduces the existing commercial products, and then illustrates recent fully integrated microfluidic devices for NAT at POC from the aspect of detection signals ( i.e. , qualitative, quantitative and digital). Importantly, the key issues of existing commercial products and the main challenges between scientific research and product development are discussed. On this basis, we envision that the MARCHED ( m iniaturized, a utomatic, r eagent-preloaded, c ommercializable, h igh-throughput, e nvironment-independent and d isposable) NAT devices are expected to be realized in the near future.

Integrated Microfluidic-Based Platforms for On-Site Detection and Quantification of Infectious Pathogens: Towards On-Site Medical Translation of SARS-CoV-2 Diagnostic Platforms

“…An added benefit of miniaturization is that the microfluidic chips can be made so that they perform high-throughput assays. This is achieved through densely packing well chambers or flow strips so that tests can be run in parallel [ 74 ]. Many integrated microfluidic devices have testing units that can be easily replicated to fulfill parallel testing on the same device [ 69 ].…”

Comparison of paper-based nucleic acid extraction materials for point-of-care testing applications

“…Especially, since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic at 2019, this technology has been chosen as the standard diagnostic tool to screen and control the infectious condition of COVID-19 in the world (Xun et al 2021 ). Nucleic acid extraction (NAE) is the primary step for nucleic acid detection, which determines the success in downstream amplification and signal analysis (Li et al 2021a ). Traditional NAE methods, such as phenol extraction method (Emaus et al 2020 ), spin-column method (Li et al 2021b ) and magnetic bead method (Chen et al 2020 ), are often associated with the issues of toxic reagents, bulky equipment, skilled operator, complex and time-consuming (40 min to 1 h) process.…”

Ball pen writing-without-ink: a truly simple and accessible method for sensitivity enhancement in lateral flow assays

“…Meanwhile, paper holds special physicochemical properties of hydrophilicity, exibility, porosity and ammability, making it very popular in point-of-care testing (POCT) as a microuidic substrate. [1][2][3][4] For now, various types of paper-based POCT devices have been developed, 5 such as dipstick assays, 6 lateral ow assay (LFA), 7 and microuidic paper-based devices (mPADs). 8,9 Among them, LFAs, especially for classical gold nanoparticle-based (AuNP-based) LFAs, have found widespread POCT applications from laboratory to clinics, due to their excellent simplicity and practicality.…”