Point-of-care microfluidic devices for pathogen detection

Abstract

The rapid diagnosis of pathogens is crucial in the early stages of treatment of diseases where the choice of the correct drug can be critical. Although conventional cell culture-based techniques have been widely utilized in clinical applications, newly introduced optical-based, microfluidic chips are becoming attractive. The advantages of the novel methods compared to the conventional techniques comprise more rapid diagnosis, lower consumption of patient sample and valuable reagents, easy application, and high reproducibility in the detection of pathogens. The miniaturized channels used in microfluidic systems simulate interactions between cells and reagents in microchannel structures, and evaluate the interactions between biological moieties to enable diagnosis of microorganisms. The overarching goal of this review is to provide a summary of the development of microfluidic biochips and to comprehensively discuss different applications of microfluidic biochips in the detection of pathogens. New types of microfluidic systems and novel techniques for viral pathogen detection (e.g. HIV, HVB, ZIKV) are covered. Next generation techniques relying on high sensitivity, specificity, lower consumption of precious reagents, suggest that rapid generation of results can be achieved via optical based detection of bacterial cells. The introduction of smartphones to replace microscope based observation has substantially improved cell detection, and allows facile data processing and transfer for presentation purposes.

A rapid microfluidic platform with real-time fluorescence detection system for molecular diagnosis

“…However, in cases when a large number of samples are tested, the option to work with smaller volumes would greatly reduce the amount of reagent consumption. We see this as an advantage of the developed platform, suggesting great applicability in molecular detection [28].…”

Integrated Micropillar Polydimethylsiloxane Accurate CRISPR Detection (IMPACT) System for Rapid Viral DNA Sensing

“…35,36 Thus, the detection system we developed is much simpler and more compact, ideal for POC applications. 37,38 To extend the detection limit, our system can be integrated with isothermal amplification methods such as recombinase polymerase amplification for sensitive "one pot" target amplification and CRISPR reaction, without the background issues seen in traditional "one-pot" methods. 17,39 An advantage of the IMPACT chip compared to other detection apparatuses such as the SHERLOCK test strip is that it is a fully enclosed system without extra packaging need.…”

Lab-on-a-Chip Technologies for the Single Cell Level: Separation, Analysis, and Diagnostics

“…Some salient examples thereof are circulating tumor cells (CTC) of various types of cancer [1,[36][37][38], rare cells (e.g., sickle-cell variants of red blood cells) [39,40], parasites, like Plasmodium falciparum [1,7,10,11,[13][14][15][21][22][23]36,[41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50] and Trypanosoma spp. [8,44,[51][52][53][54][55][56][57] and even plant pathogens [26,58], as well as-after cells have been lysed-subcellular infection markers (e.g., DNA, RNA fragments) [10,11,22,43,[59][60][61][62]. Given the vast adaptability of microfluidics to any kind of single or multi-cellular assay [63], the ability to combine it with various light microscopy techniques…”