Microfluidics for Biologists Fundamentals and Applications

3.3 Commercial Diagnostics

As the global market for PoC diagnostics is expected to grow a value of US$
24 Billion by 2018 the potential application of MF towards the production of
practical devices raises enormous excitement among the researchers [ 87 ]. Present
diagnostic techniques mainly focus on glucose monitoring, blood chemistry, and
electrolyte, pregnancy and fertility, drug and alcohol, cholesterol, hemoglobin/
hemostasis, urine chemistry and to some extent infectious disease surveillance.
The major areas of growth include HIV testing, drugs of abuse, cardiac and tumor
markers detection and diagnostics for infectious diseases. There is a long list of
companies involved in the fabrication of MF based devices for both PoC analysis as
well as general laboratory tools. Some of which along with the products are listed in
Table8.3.
The i-STAT handheld system was among the first commercially successful LoC
based products. i-STAT is a portable handheld system result of an integration of
miniature fluidics and electrochemical detection designed for analysis of electrolyte

Table 8.3 List of various PoC devices in the market from different companies [ 81 ]

Product Company Application and highlights of technology

i-STAT Abbott Blood chemistry analysis system, Portable analyzer

capillary-driven microfluidics, thin-film electrodes

for detection

Bioanalyzer

2100

Agilent Technologies Cellular and molecular analysis, chip based device

utilizing principles of flow cytometry and electro-

phoresis based assay for analysis

Piccolo

xpress®

Abaxis Blood chemistry analyser, compact analyzer,

injection-molded plastic discs, no sample

pre-processing

ACIX 100 Achira Analysis of hormones, multiplexed assay based

device utilizing fluorescence detection

cobas®Liat

System

Roche Infectious diseases and genotyping, Lab-in-a-tube

platform for automated analysis in compact benctop

instrument

epoc™ Epocal Blood chemistry analysis, Self-contained cards,

patterned electrodes for sensing, wireless data

transmission

3M™inte-

grated cycler

Focus diagnostics Flu, intestinal pathogens, Portable detector, discs

with on-board extraction

GeneXpert Cepheid Respiratory infections and cancer detection, dis-

posable cards with benchtop analyzer

(GeneXpert1), on-card sample processing (sputum)

Proxima Sphere medical Blood chemistry analysis, microanalyser with sili-

con chips and functionalized electrodes for rapid

electrochemical detection

Micronics

(Sony)

PanNAT®Molecular

Diagnostic System

Bacterial infections and drug susceptibility testing

Disposable cards with integrated heating, detection,

sample processing in a portable instrument

214 S. Solanki and C.M. Pandey

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