SBIR Phase II: Disposable pL Fluid Transfer/Microarray Printing Device

该小型企业创新研究(SBIR)二期项目提供了一种廉价的一次性聚合物工具，可在皮升到纳升范围内执行极其精确的流体传输。研究工作已经证明，采用硅微加工和电铸相结合的模具制造成本将使这些工具成为一次性工具。通过使微机械/电铸模具适应注射过程，制造过程将过渡到注射成型。这项研究将设计最后一代打印和流体转移针脚设计，使用硅微机械加工和电铸来准备96和384针打印头的注射模具，设计用于微阵列打印和流体转移应用的新型准直器/打印头，并重新设计和扩大化学表面处理工艺，以同时处理数千个针脚。由于与目前的技术相比，聚合物销的制造成本非常低，世界各地能够使用这种纳米级流体处理的实验室数量将大幅增加。该项目的更广泛影响将是以不到最昂贵的当前技术的10%的价格提供可拆卸塑料部件，从而降低对药物发现和诊断至关重要的高通量技术的成本。这可能会改善向国家提供医疗保健的情况，并降低其总体成本。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project provides an inexpensive disposable polymer tool that will perform extremely accurate fluid transfer in the picoliter to nanoliter range. Research efforts have already demonstrated that the costs associated with fabricating molds employing a combination of silicon micromachining and electroforming will allow these tools to be disposable. Fabrication processes will be transitioned to injection molding by adapting the micromachined/electroformed molds to the injection process. The research will design the final generations of the printing and fluid transfer pin designs, use silicon micromachining and electroforming to prepare the injection molds for the 96 and 384 pin printheads, design new collimator / printheads for both microarray printing and fluid transfer applications and redesign and scale up the chemical surface treatment process to treat thousands of pins simultaneously. Because the polymer pins can be manufactured so inexpensively compared to current technology, the number of laboratories around the world that can utilize this nanoscale fluid handling will dramatically increase.The broader impacts of this project will be to provide disposible plastic parts at less than ten percent of the least expensive current technology thereby enabling reductions in costs for high throughput technologies important to drug discovery and diagnostics. This could improve the delivery of healthcare to the nation and reduce its overall cost.