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bioRxiv · 10.1101/197749

Platelet enrichment from whole blood in a clog-free microfluidic radial pillar device (RAPID)

Mehendale, N. D.·Sharma, O.·D'Costa, C.·Paul, D.
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Abstract

Pillar-based passive microfluidic devices combine the advantages of simple designs, low device footprint, and high selectivity for size-based separation of blood cells. Most of these device designs have been validated with dilute blood samples. Handling whole blood in pillar-based devices is extremely challenging due to clogging. The high proportion of cells (particularly red blood cells) in blood, the varying sizes and stiffness of the different blood cells, and the tendency of the cells to aggregate lead to clogging of the pillars within a short period. We recently reported a radial pillar device (RAPID) design for contin-uous and high throughput separation of multi-sized rigid polystyrene particles in a single experiment. In this manuscript, we have given detailed guidelines to modify the design of RAPID for any application with deformable objects (e.g. cells). We have adapted RAPID to work with blood samples directly without any pre-processing steps. We were successful in operating the device with whole blood for almost 6 hours, which is difficult to achieve with most pillar-based devices. Finally, we demonstrated up to ~ 60-fold enrichment of platelets as an illustration of the improved device design. Whole blood pillar-based platelet clog-free RAPID

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Mehendale, N. D., Sharma, O., D'Costa, C., Paul, D.. 2017-10-04. Platelet enrichment from whole blood in a clog-free microfluidic radial pillar device (RAPID). https://doi.org/10.1101/197749

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