iBlood 2.0

Project team:

Hamid Khosravi,
Jasmina Casals Terre,
Oscar Carreras Gallo

Many pathologies and physiological conditions can be diagnosed through the analysis of blood plasma which provides crucial information of various internal organs. In order to fulfill these analysis most researchers, scientist and doctors use centrifugation to separate plasma from whole blood. But this technique requires a laboratory. In order to minimize error, reduce the time from blood collection to the test and provide faster and yet less expensive and comprehensive results, iBLOOD is an attractive technology for blood plasma separation and analysis. Accordingly, iBLOOD focuses on providing a a self-driven blood plasma separator as the first step toward the realization of single use, self‐blood test which now takes multiple technicians’ hours to do.

 

 

      Hyprophilic characteristics of iBLOOD materials

 

One of the characteristic features of iBLOOD is that it works automatically just by capillary pressure which eliminates the need of external sources. The requested capillary pressure to drive the sample depnds on the material hydrophilicity and surface tension, iBLOOD is manufactured using hydrophilic, biocompatible porous materials that allow plasma extraction without manipulation.

 

                             Novel design of iBLOOD capillary pumping methodology

 

The core design of iBLOOD takes advantage of a novel design of capillary pump( a MIMP -Microchannel Integrated Micropillars). In this step, the hydrodynamic effect of different MIMP shapes with low aspect ratio (H/D ranged from 0.06 to 0.2) not only  improve and optimize the design of microcapillary pumps for different passive microfluidic applications but also in particular to maximize the throughput.

 

                                                               Microfluidics in the  iBLOOD technology

Finally, iBLOOD can combine microfluidics with conventional lateral flow immune chromatography to extract enough plasma to perform a blood panel. The iBLOOD design is a combination of cross-flow filtration with a reversible electroosmotic flow that prevents clogging at the filter entrance and maximizes the amount of separated plasma. The main advantage of iBLOOD is its efficiency, since with a small amount of sample (a single droplet ~10µL) a considerable amount of plasma (more than 1µL) is extracted and collected with high purity (more than 99%) in a reasonable time (5 to 8 minutes).

iBlood, a clinical tool! iBlood has been combined with lateral flow immune chromatography technology obtaining the same quality of results with less sample and without dilution. The picture shows a qualitative detection of the TSH (thyroid-stimulating hormone).

 

                   

 iBLOOD for  measuring thyroid stimulation hormone levels.

Acknowledgment

This project has been partially supported through the call for Innovation projects with potential to be incorporated in the production sector (ACOSTA'T AL MERCAT 2020) and 50% is supported from Fons Europeus de Desenvolupament Regional de la Unió Europea in the Program FEDER de Catalunya 2014-2020.

 

 

Patent

 

Publications