Microfluidic Molecular Communications: Design, Theory, and Manufacture

分子通信（MC）为纳米/微器件在纳米到微米尺度的环境中通过化学信号进行远距离信息通信提供了一种方法。MC的成功实现将使其在未来的主要应用领域包括药物输送和环境监测。MC应用的主要障碍在于缺乏能够处理生化环境中随时间变化的化学浓度信号的纳米/微器件。一个有希望的解决方案是设计和实现可编程的数字和模拟构建模块，因为它们是MC收发器信号处理的基本构建模块。在现有的两种实现这些构建模块的方法中，即生物电路和化学电路，合成生物电路面临着速度慢、不可靠和不可扩展性等挑战，这促使我们设计新的基于化学电路的功能，用于快速原型和测试通信系统。传统的化学电路设计主要基于化学反应网络（crn）来实现从输入到输出的各种稳态浓度转换，所有化学反应都发生在同一“点”位置。这种设计不适用于通信系统中的时变信号，因为即使是具有高化学特异性的最先进的分子传感器也无法看到时间信息，这些传感器只响应信号分子的总量。因此，本项目旨在设计具有时变化学信号处理功能的基于化学反应的微流控MC原型，包括调制解调、编码解码、发射和检测。这也为时变药物浓度信号下的微流控给药原型设计和癌细胞芯片测试提供了便利。本项目的目标是开发一种新的时变化学浓度信号处理方法，用于微流控MC和微流控给药。从长远来看，1)通过利用具有流体特性的纳米材料缩小所提出的组件，并将功能化学转化为生物电路设计，我们的微流控MC结果将使MC功能实现到纳米级机器中；2)我们的微流体药物递送结果将彻底改变传统的药物递送测试方法，使ICT技术能够用于新型体外微流体药物递送，允许快速测量治疗效果，毒理学，降低开发成本并最大限度地减少动物模型的使用。

Molecular communication (MC) provides a way for nano/microdevices to communicate information over distance via chemical signals in nanometer to micrometer scale environments. The successful realization of MC will allow its future main applications, including drug delivery and environmental monitoring. The main hindrance for the MC application stands in the lack of nano/micro-devices capable of processing the time-varying chemical concentration signals in the biochemical environment. One promising solution is to design and implement programmable digital and analog building blocks, as they are fundamental building blocks for the signal processing at MC transceivers. With two existing approaches in realizing these building blocks, namely, biological circuits and chemical circuits, synthesizing biological circuits faces challenges such as slow speed, unreliability, and non-scalability, which motivates us to design novel chemical circuits-based functions for rapid prototyping and testing communication systems. Conventional chemical circuits designs are mainly based on chemical reaction networks (CRNs) to achieve various concentration transformation during the steady state from the input to the output with all chemical reactions occurring in same "point" location. This kind of design does not fit for the time-varying signals in communication system due to that the temporal information can be invisible to even state-of-the-art molecular sensors with high chemical specificity that respond only to the total amount of the signaling molecules. Thus, this project aims to design the chemical reaction-based microfluidic MC prototypes with time-varying chemical signal processing functionalities, including modulation anddemodulation, encoding and decoding, emission and detection. This also facilitates the microfluidic drug delivery prototype design and cancer cell on chip testing under time-varying drug concentration signal. This project has the ambitious vision to develop novel time-varying chemical concentration signal processing methodology for microfluidic MC and microfluidic drug delivery. In the long run, 1) our microfluidic MC results will enable the implementation of MC functionality into nanoscale machines, by downsizing the proposed components through the utilization of nanomaterials with fluidic properties, and by translating the functional chemistry into biological circuit designs; 2) our microfluidic drug delivery results will revolutionize the conventional drug delivery testing approach by enabling ICT technologies for novel in-vitro microfluidics for drug delivery, allowing rapid measurement of therapeutic effect, toxicology, to reduce development costs and minimize the use of animal models.