Microfluidic Molecular Communications: Design, Theory, and Manufacture

分子通信(MC)为纳米/微米级环境中的纳米/微米器件提供了一种通过化学信号进行远距离信息传递的方法。MC的成功实现将使其未来的主要应用，包括药物输送和环境监测。阻碍MC应用的主要障碍是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/微米器件。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块，因为它们是MC收发机信号处理的基本构建块。现有的两种实现这些构件的方法，即生物电路和化学电路，生物电路的合成面临着速度慢、可靠性和不可伸缩性等挑战，这促使我们设计基于化学电路的新功能，用于快速原型和测试通信系统。传统的化学反应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稳态过程中的各种浓度变化，所有的化学反应都发生在同一个点上。这种设计不适合于通信系统中的时变信号，因为即使是最先进的分子传感器也无法看到时间信息，因为这种传感器只对信号分子的总量做出响应，具有很高的化学专一性。因此，本项目旨在设计基于化学反应的具有时变化学信号处理功能的微流控原型，包括调制和解调、编码和解码、发射和检测。这也方便了微流控药物输送原型的设计和时变药物浓度信号下的癌细胞芯片测试。该项目有一个雄心勃勃的愿景，即开发用于微流控MC和微流控药物输送的新型时变化学浓度信号处理方法。从长远来看，1)我们的微流体MC成果将有助于将MC功能应用到纳米机器中，通过使用具有流体性质的纳米材料来缩小建议的组件尺寸，并将功能化学转化为生物电路设计；2)我们的微流体药物释放成果将通过为新型体外微流体药物释放提供ICT技术来革新传统的药物释放测试方法，从而能够快速测量疗效、毒理和毒性，从而降低开发成本和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.