Pictured to the right is the basic design of one of my microfluidic devices. I fabricated them using a simple PDMS process – creating a mold using photolithography of SU-8 on a silicon wafer. An even simpler way to make molds is to use a stereolithography company or 3D printing.
The macroscale interf
ace to the microfluidic devices were assembled using HPLC equipment. We used a Harvard Apparatus syringe pump to drive flow through the chip – controlled by LabView code communicating through a RS232 connection.
With s
uch methods we were able to culture cells in the chip – even combining the microfluidic devices with extracellular matricies, and watching cells move through the channel.