Team:NYU Abu Dhabi/Design
Design
The design outcomes were undoubtedly affected by our extensive literature review. Although the team knew what the goals were, the means to ticking all of them were still unclear. The review on key enabling technologies for point-of-care diagnostics by Primicieri et al. became a cornerstone of our endeavor. The use of in-field assays and integrated lab-on-a-chip technologies seemed to be a major trend. Furthermore, addressing environmental needs was also noticed in the reviewed works on the paper (refer to microfluidics membrane valves on page 14-15 and the Q3 device on page 16).
Valves that served as inspiration when considering approaches.
Complete reagent pre storage model, uses lab-on-a-foil system for nucleic acid detection. Served as an inspiration for implementing storage units in the part that would execute the analysis so that we minimized the number of small insertions of the microliter magnitude i.e multiple inlets that would lead to cross-contamination (refer to the 2018 NYUAD iGEM page to showcase how we are reflecting on last year’s mistakes)
From Primicieri et al.’s review we also learned that integrated technologies are a world-wide engineering trend and hence, we were very keen on developing a complex yet cheap and recyclable integrated lab-on-a-chip platform. Through the encouragement of Dr. Song (link to attributes), we set out to use 3M hydrophilic films as a means of improving the flow of the reagents. The engineering team however, had to settle with which lab-on-a-chip platform to go with.
Figure above shows the comparison of various approaches to microfluidics.
The market research also helped us be more convinced on the advantages of integrated microfluidics. Papers from the institute of Integrated Circuits of the Johannes Kepler University (see Attributes) and the extensive documentation of Boston University HW team also convinced us on the versatility of the microfluidics approach over using cartridges. As of deciding which microfluidics approach to choose, we left that to further experimentation as explained in the notebook.
It is worthy to mention that since our device was ready for the market, the perception of microfluidics and biotechnology mattered if the implementation was to be taken seriously and for the feedback collected from Integrated Human Practices team to be meaningful. We looked at Gartner’s (IT information and consulting company) 2019 guide on Hype Cycle for emerging technologies. The Hype Cycle which according to Alexander Linden on "Understanding Gartner’s hype cycles" provides “a snapshot of the relative maturity of technologies within a certain segment of the IT world” (page 5). The report clearly stated that the market’s support for integrated biotechnology is on the rise, meaning that Volatect is also properly timed and following a lucrative approach with microfluidics and integrated technology.
