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

各种各样的用户对新的诊断技术有巨大的需求，这反映在医院和家庭使用的保健需求、与兽医有关的动物保健部门的需求、食品质量检查和环境管理方面的需求。许多最有竞争力的诊断技术都利用了纳米材料，特别是共轭纳米颗粒。通过与我们的行业合作伙伴GL Chemtec的合作，我们的共同利益是学习如何有效地制造改性纳米颗粒和微珠，以支持各种诊断应用的发展。我们建议开发一种基于两相油中水滴的微流体平台，该平台可以在不使用复杂的控制系统和增加设备占地面积的情况下，以kHz速率连续流动的方式划分单个反应。所提出的方法的基础是将单个聚合物珠封装在液滴中，以便在严格控制的反应环境中固定和修饰NPs在珠上，然后有效地回收修饰的纳米颗粒。除了从珠子中回收修饰的纳米颗粒外，这种涂有纳米颗粒的珠子也将被开发出来，为竞争性诊断平台提供转导组件。该项目的目标是开发一种微流控平台，其制造吞吐量比目前最好的平台高一个数量级，同时通过正交化学的实施，为纳米颗粒的各种共轭物的修饰提供灵活性。所提出的流体技术和反应化学提供了在连续流动中以每秒数千个的速度生产珠子的能力，提供了实际数量（毫克到克）的高质量装饰纳米颗粒的可扩展连续生产。

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.