The BioMiNT Lab at UC Irvine has developed a microfluidic platform that uses AESOP technology to deliver genetic material into cells, which engineers them to fight diseases like cancer. Ex vivo cell and gene therapy has the potential to save lives. Despite having a successful prototype, the problem is that the platform is currently made from Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a silicone polymer that only lasts about ten minutes during operation and cannot be mass-produced quickly or at a low cost. Team FloBoss’s objective is to transition this platform to one of the following thermoplastic materials: Flexdym, Polystyrene (PS), and Polymethyl Methacrylate (PMMA). These materials will extend the operation time, increasing the throughput, lowering manufacturing costs, and enabling large-scale production. Scaling up this technology allows cell-based therapies to be more accessible to hospitals, medical professionals, and the patients who need this care the most.
Our platform, AESOP, uses Lateral Cavity Acoustic Transducers (LCATs) to perform high throughput cell sorting and intracellular delivery on a microfluidic chip. A piezoelectric transducer, driven by a signal generator and amplifier, generates the acoustic energy that creates vortices in the chip. These vortices generate fluid shear forces that temporarily open nanopores in cell membranes, and a secondary electric field further expands these pores, allowing therapeutic cargo to enter the cells. On the fabrication side, we are using hot embossing to form microfluidic chips from thermoplastics, where we use precision silicon wafer molds to produce chips with the channel geometries required for LCAT operation. We are currently testing material compatibility to ensure reliable, defect-free chip production. Looking ahead, a key engineering challenge will be scaling the platform to support larger chip sizes while maintaining uniform performance across the device.
By the end of this project, we will have produced a microfluidic chip that has a higher throughput than the prototype produced by BioMiNT Labs. while being compatible with the hot embossing for large-scale manufacturing. The final deliverable will include a validated microfluidic channel layout, a silicon wafer mold suitable for thermoplastic replication, and fabricated thermoplastic chips produced using a material that is common in the microlfluidics industry and provides optimal results. Proof-of-concept testing during this project will validate throughput, air–liquid interface stability, and bonding reliability under operating conditions. So far, we have confirmed the usage of Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and Flexdym in the lab, but we have yet to test out Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) and Polystyrene (PS).