I remember this concept in a paper from university of texas maybe 14 years ago or more, it was pretty exciting but i did not have enough application to my current projects to explore the idea more. It's exciting to see how fast this reached a tinkerer marked and home labs. There is also the microbiology analogue where instead of big droplets you can move single cells or beads with activated surfaces in a fluid with dielectrophoresis.
These lab on a chip devices seemed so logical and i imagined we would soon be able to do complex blood analysis and do completely automated experiments with minimal manual work and completely driven by software. The reality was disappointing enough for me to go back to pure software. There were too limited real world applications and also the development cycle for complete products were just too long for me (i estimated 15 years for the kind of products i would have wanted to work on).
Microfluidics is great. I'd love to see opto-microfluidics work, which is when you coat a display in a thin layer of the same material you use to make photodiodes so that you can switch the power on/off using light from a normal LCD display.
Anyone who can get that to work reliably will open up a whole lot of new form factors for microfluidics.
(Bonus points if you couple that with LCD-driven resin 3D printing, so that you can move/mix resin around and harden it using one device)
These microfluidic devices have the potential to be an entire biology lab on your desk.
It's like a tiny robot to move droplets around, except that the actuation happens via electrostatic force instead of pipettes and grippers.
They have the added advantage of using vastly less fluids than micropipettes and are thus cheaper in their operation, additionally due to their small solid state form factor it is possible to stack millions of these in a server-room like structure with the experimentation capacity of the worlds biology / medicine grad students combined.
Also imagine this:
The year 2061 covid-60 has been spreading rapidly throughout the population thanks to cheap 30 minute point to point travel provided by SpaceX Starship.
Within a week various research organisations have provided the public with blueprints for a quick antibody test, which can be loaded onto your home microfluidic device. All you have to do is put a droplet of blood into the inlet port, and the device will synthesise the required components from a series of base consumable chemicals that can be refilled like an inkjet cartridge.
Two weeks later a novel mRNA vaccine is released and available for download. Due to massive parallel production the world population is vaccinated within a week.
Very cool. Now I would like you to describe "the Black Mirror scenario". That is, what is the cruelest, most despicable thing humanity can do with this tech, regardless of it's other more positive uses?
You could handle extremely dangerous material without human contact and at a really large diversity scale. So you can make a scenario where people use these to develop chemical or bio weapons.
Quite the opposite. You could handle material that can be handled by any other lab equipment (that's what lab equipment is for) at minuscule scales.
People have been producing Chemical- and Bioweapons already with stuff you can essentially order on amazon. If a large drug lab decided to do nerve agents they could probably do so.
Additionally you need surprisingly large amounts of these weapons to effectively target more than a couple people.
Fear of these things causing a doomsday movie like scenario where somebody combines the common cold with ebola in their garage are like fearing 3D printed guns when you might as well buy a fully automatic rifle at the next U.S. gun shop or E.U. criminal.
You misunderstood me I said the --diversity-- was large not the amounts. Also I was talking about screening scale, not production scale (I said develop).
Really cool! Love to see the modularity and reusability aspect of it, it looks like a really professional system.
If you're interested in the software side of things you might be interested in the paper below, I've seen a lot of work on doing heuristics to solve the routing problem for drops on these devices. The paper solves the problem by transforming it to SAT, which in turn results in an optimal plan in a single pass.
The most persuasive electrowetting grid technology would show you a video of the device running for hours without error.
Of course all the demo videos you see show mere minutes of content because the underlying problem with these is their fault rate.
They will incorrectly not push a drop when they were instructed to do so, which is irrecoverable by itself. That means nearly all experiments run on these grid platforms fail. So you need a separate system, like a camera, to detect a fault, and have a recovery procedure, for every step of the experiment. Which as you see, these things operate at the level of "assembly instructions" not high level programming, so you wind up with recovery procedures longer than the experiment itself. A recovery that itself may fault.
What is the concrete scientific problem? My understanding is, there's science to do around the formula and application of the coating between the liquid and the electric grid. Commercial electrowetting systems, which of course exist and don't have the problems of amateur ones, use solvents other than water, so they interact with some coatings much more reliably.
On the flip side, 1 minute of video is all you need to raise money.
There's several seed stage companies, maybe even invested in by Y Combinator, that sort of scammed their investors with electrowetting. And it's of course not just electrowetting, the microbiome and vegan foods communities are big culprits.
This is a common failure pattern, transferring academy-refined 1 minute videos into venture dollars, which is really the worst path because you are definitely not going to do the science you need with venture backing if you didn't do it in the academy.
But venture investing is so memetic that 1 minute demos, tweet-sized due diligence and $40m raised for marketing instead of scientific research is definitely here to stay. These are profitable adaptations, no hot take is going to change that. Rather venture capital as an institution isn't credibly doing any science, that the people running these seed fund shows are really kind of stupid, and that we really ought to stop cutting their tax bills.
These lab on a chip devices seemed so logical and i imagined we would soon be able to do complex blood analysis and do completely automated experiments with minimal manual work and completely driven by software. The reality was disappointing enough for me to go back to pure software. There were too limited real world applications and also the development cycle for complete products were just too long for me (i estimated 15 years for the kind of products i would have wanted to work on).