Microfluidic Cartridge Cleaner

Description

Story behind: Isoflux® is one of the leading and state of the art circulating tumour cell (CTC) isolation devices. The microfluidic cartridges used by isoflux® device is a single use plastic consumable and each cartridge cost about £100 and can process 20ml of patient blood in a single run.

These Microfluidic cartridges are special part required for the isoflux® device to operate but the reagents used to isolate the CTC cells are generic and can be prepared in house or equal alternatives can be found.  A few professors around the world have contacted us and asked us to find a way to recycle those plastic cartridges in order to reduce the cost of running isoflux® as well as reducing the plastic waste generated.

We have specifically invented this unique cleaning device for cleaning highly complex microfluidic channels embedded in these cartridges. This washer allowed our customers (cancer research scientists) to be able run multiple patient samples in parallel, slashing the cost of operation by 25 times from almost £100 per sample to £4 per sample.

This was only made possible by recycling the microfluidic cartridges by our unique washer which we specifically invented for them. Each chip can be recycled more than 30 times. Placing chips in UV oven also sterilises them for possible CTC recovery and culturing studies.