Droplet & Particle generation

Drug delivery

In recent years, biodegradable microcapsules/microparticles have gained widespread importance in the delivery of bioactive agents.  Polymer based microcapsules/microparticles are one of the most successful new drug delivery systems. They can be used in various areas, such as long-term release systems, vaccine adjuvant, and tissue engineering. Droplet based microfluidics allows highly monodispersed droplet and microcapsules/microparticles production opposed to  batch emulsion methods and provides an “In-line” continuous droplet production process.

Formulation

The encapsulation of active ingredients such as flavors or fragrances for cosmetics and food products is a key step in these areas. One of the most important challenges in encapsulation isto prevent the leakage of the encapsulated species. The possibility to encapsulate these compounds allow one to control the release of the compound and have improved pharmacokinetics.

Next generation sequencing (NGS)

Encapsulation of single cell inside droplet allow to increase NGS efficiency. The ability to study cell at single cell level using droplet based systems combined withNGS techniques allow for the sequencing of the mRNA from a large number of cells. The power of this technology resides in the fact that during sequencing, one can distinguish where the original information came on a cell to cell basis. This allows one to make a gene expression map of the cell, or even to distinguish cell populations within a tissue.

Drug discovery

In vitro cell culture is a fundamental component of biological production systems and biotechnological research. The ability to grow cells outside of their natural environment offers many possibilities ranging from high quantity production of enzymes to cell toxicity studies and drug discovery.

Droplet microfluidics allows one to encapsulate single or multiple cells into tiny droplets of pL volume which are generated at a rate of approximately one thousand per second.

Diagnostics

A key measurement challenge in diagnostic research involves identifying small changes in nucleic acid sequence that are commonly associated with genetic diseases such as Down’s syndrome, and many cancers. Digital PCR (dPCR) carries out a single reaction within a sample as standard PCR, however the sample is separated into a large number of partitions where reactions take place in each partition individually. This is an excellent solution to partition a sample, and dPCR technology that make use of droplet microfluidics is often called droplet digital PCR (ddPCR).