Phase II IUCRC at University of Illinois at Chicago: Center for Advanced Design and Manufacturing of Integrated Microfluidics (CADMIM)

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The Center for Advanced Design and Manufacturing of Integrated Microfluidics (CADMIM) develops technologies for integrating and manufacturing labs-on-a-chip (LOCs) for easy diagnosis of the human health, agriculture, and the environment. CADMIM emphasizes design-oriented research that anticipates the need for cost-effective manufacture and practical deployment, taking a broad integrated strategy that seeks breakthroughs at the interfaces of material science, engineering, biology, chemistry, and electronics in the development of next generation LOCs. These considerations early in the research and design cycle are key to transitioning technologies out of academic laboratories and into the manufacturing sector. Expected broader impacts include competitive recruitment mechanisms and attractive cross-disciplinary collaborative research opportunities to engage excellent students and post-docs, including members of underrepresented groups and veterans. Knowledge dissemination includes publications, invention disclosures, and patents. Scalable prototyping processes developed and/or adapted for microfluidics will also be made available to academia and industry, including established companies and entrepreneurs, with a goal to dramatically reduce the learning curve and streamline the idea-to-product process. This center will help catalyze the generation of new knowledge and pre-competitive research results to enable the development of microfluidics based technologies to enable industry to address pressing societal needs. The goal of this center is to develop technologies for integrating and manufacturing labs-on-a-chip (LOCs) for easy diagnosis of the human health, agriculture, and the environment. The strategy for meeting this goal centers on mass-produced diagnostic devices equipped with microfluidic components, chip-sized devices with high sensitivities (nM - pM) and short assay times ( 30 min) -- capable of chemical analyses in miniaturized volumes (ul - pl). The few available commercial microfluidic systems are expensive (costing up to hundreds of thousand dollars) and do not have effective sampling and analysis capability. What does not yet exist are mass-produced, cost-effective LOC platforms that integrate components to carry out multiple microfluidic/diagnostic functions and report results via a standard communications device. A primary obstacle is the lack of integration-enabling and manufacturable LOCs capable of processing real-world samples. Innovation is needed on two related fronts: (a) employing and/or modifying existing scalable processes make microfluidic devices, and (b) designing LOCs that are autonomous, field deployable, and amenable to mass production. By working closely with industrial member companies, CADMIM will make significant strides towards commercialization of microfluidic technology, leading to new products, the creation of new companies and/or new divisions within existing firms, new jobs, and other tangible commercial and societal impacts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.