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Biotech Companies Invest Microfluidic Device Development for Pathogen Detection

 Emerging COVID-19 variants have encouraged many biotech giants to actively participate in developing microfluidic devices for rapid and accurate SARS-CoV-2 detection.

 

Though the current global wave of the omicron COVID-19 variant is relatively mild in terms of causing severe disease and death, it's necessary to continuously develop new technologies and strategies to identify and resist COVID-19 infection in case more aggressive variants may come around from nowhere. Microfluidics, a highly miniaturized, automatic, and integrated technology, is expected to perform rapid, low-cost, accurate, and point-of-care detection of infectious diseases like COVID-19. Researchers from leading life science companies like Creative Biolabs have gotten involved in developing and designing microfluidic devices for different applications, including devices for quick and accurate SARS-CoV-2 detection.

 

Microfluidic Chips for Pathogen Detection

 

Infectious diseases arise from pathogens, including bacteria, viruses, and parasites, with global distribution and transmission between individuals. Scientists have developed some disposable microfluidic chips that can detect pathogens simply with drops of biological fluids, such as saliva, blood, sweat, and urine. For instance, a microfluidic chip can accurately detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus with a few drops of saliva with fluorescent antibodies against the virus, whose accuracy could be comparable to the gold-standard test, PCR.

 

Besides the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the microfluidic chips are versatile in manipulating and detecting many other pathogens, including seasonal coronavirus, HIV, influenza viruses, the Zika virus, H1N1 influenza virus, and even microorganisms like Legionella and E. coli. Moreover, microfluidic chips have also been combined with traditional methods like PCR, RT-PCR, qPCR, RT-LAMP due to simplicity in function and fabrication, rapid turnaround time, decreased reagent consumption, reduced contamination, etc.

 

Driven by the rapid advancements of technology, digital microfluidic devices for molecular diagnostics have become attractive and promising tools to deal with the severe COVID-19 pandemic as well as diseases caused by other pathogens.

 

The increasing need of adopting cutting-edge microfluidic-based tools has encouraged life science companies like Creative Biolabs to be dedicated to providing one-stop solutions to microfluidic chip development and design, especially microfluidic chips for tumor marker detection, viruses detection, and fungal infections. Several automatic and portable microfluidic platforms have been established for single-cell analyses, molecular diagnostics, DNA sequencing, PCR amplification, amino acid/peptide/protein analysis, immunoassays, cell sorting, manipulation, and so on.

 

About the Author

 

Vivian is a biotechnology beat reporter exploring the cutting edge of microfluidic analysis. To find out more about microfluidic chips, click here.

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