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by tranzudao 1740 days ago
I’m actually one of the authors. The main thing we are trying to address in microfluidics is he feasibility, which is why we have been focusing on 3D printing as opposed to traditional clean room fabrication techniques because we can make a new design and see if it works in all of like 15 minutes whereas with clean room fabrication it would take closer to weeks. As far as the connections, we talk about those in some of our earlier papers referenced in the article, but it is actually quite simple. Instead of traditional connectors, we just include roughly 1mm diameter output holes where we can epoxy in tubing that has the same width.
2 comments
pen2l 1740 days ago
Congrats on the nature publication! And congrats on making the HN frontpage, I think this is one of the few times I've seen a paper (as opposed to a news article about a paper) on the frontpage.

What type of epoxy do you use? I imagine depositing the epoxy in micro-doses must take a steady hand.

Your approach is great for its simplicity. Can you comment on the biocompatibility of the cured resin? Good enough to culture cells in?

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tranzudao 1740 days ago
We were using a UV curing epoxy from Amazon, but we stopped because it had biocompatibility issue. Now we just use whatever is cheapest at the hardware store. It isn't hard at all to make the connections because the tubes go straight into the device and then we just epoxy on the outside and that is good enough.

My main contribution was testing the biocompatibility of the resins actually. The original resin was developed by the engineering team and while it worked well, some of the ingredients were extremely cytotoxic (to the point where if someone got it on their skin it would leave a nasty chemical burn). The resin used in the paper was a newer formulation that is completely biocompatible. The last bit of the paper is a quick dose-response assay with live cells.

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R0b0t1 1740 days ago
Do you list the 3d printing apparatus used?
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tranzudao 1740 days ago
The 3d printer was custom built by our lab. They have since commercialized the design and are sold by the company Acrea 3D.
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