NSF Award
0646638
This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project provides an inexpensive disposable polymer tool that will perform extremely accurate fluid transfer in the picoliter to nanoliter range. Research efforts have already demonstrated that the costs associated with fabricating molds employing a combination of silicon micromachining and electroforming will allow these tools to be disposable. Fabrication processes will be transitioned to injection molding by adapting the micromachined/electroformed molds to the injection process. The research will design the final generations of the printing and fluid transfer pin designs, use silicon micromachining and electroforming to prepare the injection molds for the 96 and 384 pin printheads, design new collimator / printheads for both microarray printing and fluid transfer applications and redesign and scale up the chemical surface treatment process to treat thousands of pins simultaneously. Because the polymer pins can be manufactured so inexpensively compared to current technology, the number of laboratories around the world that can utilize this nanoscale fluid handling will dramatically increase.<br/><br/>The broader impacts of this project will be to provide disposible plastic parts at less than ten percent of the least expensive current technology thereby enabling reductions in costs for high throughput technologies important to drug discovery and diagnostics. This could improve the delivery of healthcare to the nation and reduce its overall cost.
