Scaling up ‘pocket lab’ production

Numerous researchers have developed powerful lab-on-a-chip (LOC) devices in recent years, however, very few have had success in the market. Under the ML² project funded by the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme, scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology (Aachen, Germany) are collaborating with colleagues from polyscale GmbH & Co. KG (Aachen, Germany), and ten other industrial partners from Germany, Finland, Spain, UK, France and Italy. The project aims to uncover why so many of these ‘pocket labs’ have not experienced commercial success, and develop suitable and cost-effective methods for mass production in order to make them more marketable.

Christoph Baum, Group Manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology, explained, “One of the main reasons LOCs don’t make it to market is that the technologies used to fabricate them are often not transferrable to industrial-scale production.” He continued, “Our objective is to create a design and production platform that will enable us to manufacture all the components we need.”

LOC devices consist of a number of individual films with different components, such as electrical circuits or microfluidic channels. The manufacturing process for each of these layers is being revised and adapted to suit mass production requirements. For example, the researchers have favored roll-to-roll processes over the use of injection molding or wet chemical processing techniques for the induction of channel structures.

The team is currently producing a number of demonstrator LOCs and fine-tuning each manufacturing stage with the hope of optimizing the processes by 2014.

Source: Mass producing pocket labs.