Aluminium valving and magneto-balloon mixing for rapid prediction of septic shock on centrifugal microfluidic platforms

Rapid and early diagnosis of sepsis is critical, as sepsis mortality increases by 8 % per each hour of delay in treatment. It has been recently shown that the quantification of soluble triggering receptors expressed on myeloid cells-1 (sTREM-1) can accurately predict sepsis and septic shock in infected neonates. To automate sTREM-1 ELISA on a microfluidic disc, we developed a novel active valving mechanism by adding an aluminium and a thin flexible film layer to the common plastic materials used for the disc fabrication. To enable rapid sepsis detection and prediction of septic shock, we employed an active microballoon-based flow reciprocation mechanism in centrifugal microfluidic platforms to accelerate the sTREM-1 immunoassay. The technique is called magneto-balloon mixing and provides one liquid reciprocation cycle per disc revolution and accelerates biomolecular reactions happening on the microfluidic disc, leading to the rapid detection of sTREM-1 by ELISA. The magneto-balloon enabled the reduction of the assay time for the detection of 60 pg/ml sTREM-1 (for sepsis detection) and 300 pg/ml (for septic shock prediction) from five hours to 75 min. Based on the aluminium valving and magneto-balloon mixing techniques, we developed an automated centrifugal microfluidic platform that enables rapid prediction of septic shock.