Three dimensional (3D) printing has proven to be a valuable fabrication and prototyping technique for many industries looking to use rapid feedback to drive innovation.  The ease of editing, redevelopment and creation of a new device allows for optimization based on experiments in nearly real time.  Most commercially available 3D printing resins used for stereolithography, fused deposition modeling, other methods do not work for printing microfluidic features (&lt;100 µm).  Studies of polymerization depth for various exposure times allowed us to formulate our own custom resin for 3D printing channels sufficiently small (&lt;100 μm) for microchip capillary electrophoresis.  The analytes we have focused on for separation are ones recently identified to predict potential preterm birth in pregnancies, since currently there are no clinically available methods for diagnosing this important pregnancy complication.  Point of care diagnostic devices are an underutilized and potentially valuable tool for diagnosing health issues, including preterm birth, because they use little sample, are portable, cost little to make, and can be automated.  3D printing allows design of unique microfluidic features based on rapid feedback of many different design iterations.  We were able to separate fluorescently labeled amino acid, peptide, and protein samples using microchip electrophoresis.  Limits of detection, resolution and separation efficiency were determined for the analytes.  We are working to extend this analysis to additional biomarkers implicated in preterm birth.  Also, we plan to incorporate monoliths, pumps and valves into the devices to integrate sample enrichment and on chip labeling.  Our methods of 3D printing small microfluidic features (&lt;100 μm) will enable faster prototyping, feedback based innovation, and analyses, thus providing a scalable fabrication technique for devices that can be automated for many different biomarker analyses.

Microchip electrophoresis separation of pre-term birth biomarkers in a 3D printed device

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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