Droplet microfluidic system for production of high value coatings on luminescent nanoparticles

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There is tremendous demand for new diagnostic technologies by a wide variety of users as reflected by health care needs in hospitals and for home use, for the animal care sector associated with veterinary medicine, for food quality screening, and for environmental management. Many of the most competitive diagnostic technologies make use of nanomaterials, and in particular, conjugated nanoparticles. In collaboration with our industry partner GL Chemtec, our joint interest is to learn to efficiently manufacture modified nanoparticles and microbeads that will support the development of a variety of diagnostic applications. We propose to develop a two-phase water-in-oil droplet-based microfluidic platform that enables compartmentalization of individual reactions at kHz rates in a continuous flow manner, without the use of sophisticated control systems and the need to increase the device footprint. The basis of the proposed method is to encapsulate an individual polymer bead within a droplet so that immobilization and decoration of NPs on the bead will be done in a rigorously controlled reaction environment, followed by efficient recovery of the decorated nanoparticles. Beyond recovery of decorated nanoparticles from beads, such beads coated with nanoparticles will also be developed to provide the transduction component for competitive diagnostic platforms. The goal of this project is to develop a microfluidic platform with an order of magnitude higher manufacturing throughput than the best presently available, while concurrently providing flexibility in decoration of nanoparticles with a variety of conjugates by implementation of orthogonal chemistries. The proposed fluidics technology and reaction chemistries offer the capability of producing beads at a rate of thousands per second in continuous flow, offering scalable continuous production of practical quantities (milligrams to grams) of high quality decorated nanoparticles.