Rapid prototyping of microfluidic logic with high resolution 3D printing

项目摘要 该项目旨在通过使筛选技术更加有效， 容易接近目前，新的药物线索是通过测试大量未知化学物质发现的 看看是否有你想要的效果。由于这个过程有点慢， 这种测试费用昂贵，但并不像它应该的那样彻底和广泛。我们试图让 化学反应将在微小的液滴中进行，这将大大降低生产成本。 这些反应，使它有可能运行更多的一起一次。 为了做到这一点，我们正在建造一个新的设备，一个巨大的液滴分配器阵列。阵列 设想它足够大，可以容纳你感兴趣的整套未知化学物质， 试验.数组是非常灵活的。它可以快速分配整套化学品， 每种化学品的不同浓度，以便我们可以找到最有效的剂量，或分配 化学物质的各种不同组合，这样我们就可以发现哪些药物可以很好地配合使用。 为了使这一系列的分配器工作，我们正在使用一种新型的微芯片技术 其中电路携带液体而不是电子。我们的液体回路的独特之处在于 可以像计算机一样进行计算。这最终对这个项目非常有用 因为我们使用这种计算能力来控制大量的分配器。 我们最初建议通过CNC微铣削来制造微芯片原型。虽然这是一 然而，由于这种方法是有效的，制造过程是非常耗时和劳动密集型的。最近，3D 打印已经发展到10微米像素分辨率可以在负担得起的打印机中实现的程度。 足以容纳在单独的实验室里。我们要求行政补充购买 我们自己的高分辨率3D打印机这将大大减少完成每个设计-构建-测试的时间 工程周期，使我们能够更快地优化和优化我们的设备。

PROJECT SUMMARY This project seeks to make drug discovery more effective by making the screening technology more accessible. Currently, new drug leads are discovered by testing a large number of unknown chemicals to see if any have the effect that you are looking for. Since this process is somewhat slow and expensive, such testing is not as thorough and widespread as it should be. We are trying to allow the chemical reactions to be run in microscopic droplets of liquid, which would greatly lower the cost of these reactions and make it possible to run many more together at once. To accomplish this, we are building a new device, a gigantic array of droplet dispensers. The array is envisioned to be large enough to hold the entire set of unknown chemicals that you are interested in testing. The array is very flexible. It can quickly dispense the entire set of chemicals, dispense many different concentrations of each chemical so that we can find the most effective dose, or dispense the chemicals in a variety of different combinations so that we can discover which drugs work well together. In order to make this array of dispensers work, we are using a new type of microchip technology where the circuits carry liquids instead of electrons. What is unique about our liquid circuits is that they can perform computations much like a computer can. This ends up being very useful for this project because we use this computational power to control the large array of dispensers. We originally proposed to fabricate the microchip prototypes by CNC micro-milling. While this is an effective approach, the manufacturing process is extremely time and labor intensive. Recently, 3D printing has advanced to the point that 10-micron pixel resolution can be achieved in printers affordable enough to be housed in individual laboratories. We request an administrative supplement to purchase our own high-resolution 3D printer. This will greatly reduce the time to complete each design-build-test engineering cycle, allowing us to iterate and optimize our devices much more quickly.