Microfluidics
A very interesting opportunity that we focused on in the late 1990s was the miniaturization of fluidic systems. We describe the use of soft lithography for microfluidics in the Science article “From micro- to nanofabrication with soft materials”, the first use of microfluidic systems and the definition of micro-valves and pumps in the Science article “Monolithic microfabricated valves and pumps by multilayer soft lithography”, and the use of three-dimensionally integrated microfluidic system in the PNAS paper entitled “Microfluidic vias enable nested bioarrays and autoregulatory devices in Newtonian fluids”. This work has resulted in the use of microfluidics for cell sorting, micro-arrays, disease diagnostic systems and a variety of other biomedical applications. A company (Fluidigm) was founded based on the research described in these publications in 2001, and microfluidic chips with over 2000 of the valves described in our work have been fabricated and are now routinely used for clinical and research applications.
