Doctor Greg Nordin, an Electrical Engineering professor, and his co-workers received a Best Paper Award at the SPIE Photonics West conference for their paper entitled “3D Printing for Lab-on-Chip Devices with 20μm Channels” on February 13, 2019.
The paper discusses the research he and his team - consisting of some PhD students, mainly Hua Gong, and Professor Adam Woolley - have been working on for the past several years. His work deals with microfluidics, or lab-on-a-chip, created in custom-made 3D printers.
Put simply, Dr. Nordin explained that lab-on-a-chip is “where you take a biomedical laboratory, and shrink it down to a tiny little chip.” This chip would ideally be able to test a drop of blood for possible disease in a quick, convenient manner.
Of it, he said, “The hope is that you have this whole set of tests you can do with this small drop of blood and do them so cheaply that you do it all the time. Therefore, you can have a biochemical record of your body’s state over time to help diagnose anything that could be going wrong with a person.”
In order to make lab-on-chip devices, researchers have historically used a cleanroom, which results in long and complicated fabrication processes. In 2012, Dr. Nordin had the idea of making lab-on-chip devices with a 3D printer instead. The problem is that commercial 3D printers cannot create features that are small enough for what a lab-on-chip requires.
“For commercial 3D printers, a resolution of 50 microns (half the diameter of a human hair) is perfectly fine. It addresses those markets really well. But it’s just way too big for what we need to do,” he said.
As a result, Dr. Nordin and his team decided to build their own 3D printer and develop their own materials, both of which are specifically tailored to work together to achieve the small features needed for lab-on-a-chip devices.
In explaining the process of the printing, he said, “What we do is have a liquid that we can photopolymerize so everywhere we expose it to light, we can turn it into a solid. We shine an image up through a transparent bottom into a thin layer and polymerize it according to whatever pattern the image is. Then we pull that up and out and bring it back down minus the next layer of thickness.”
This process has allowed them to create these lab-on-a-chip devices. A summary of their research was written in the paper for which he received the award.
Ultimately, what was initially started from frustration has turned into an exciting research project. Dr. Nordin hopes that, in the future, these 3D printers will bring great results into the biomedical field.
“We’re working on yet another generation of 3D printer that is totally wild. It’s going to be awesome if we can get it to work the way we want it to. It will shake things up again.”