Designing cartridges: custom or off-the-shelf?

We recently had the pleasure of collaborating with the talented folks at Fusion Biotec to write a short piece looking at how diagnostics development is changing. Our primary observation: microfluidic technologies are maturing, and that means more pre-built and off-the-shelf options than ever before.

From the article:

Designing point-of-care diagnostic cartridges has always been a custom affair….However, as the industry matures, novel components, pre-developed subsystems, and even entire white-label systems are increasingly viable options….Diagnostic cartridges are usually microfluidic systems in which fluids behave non-intuitively, and assays that performed reliably in a wet lab with pipettes and tubes may start to fail….

 

Using modules and components that have been road tested in similar assays can mitigate these risks. Historically, this was nearly impossible because microfluidics was an active research area. But over the last two decades, microfluidics has moved slowly but unmistakably from the research lab to the manufacturing floor, and ultimately into the clinic. As the field matures and methods become more consistent, purpose-built components become better defined.