A Disposable Chip Enabling Metering In Dried Blood Spot Sampling

Abstract

This work presents a disposable chip for metering and transferring an exactly defined liquid volume into a paper matrix by capillary filling and emptying of a microchannel together with self-actuated dissolvable valves. Once a liquid droplet of 20-50 μl is applied to the chip, a volume of 1 μl is automatically metered, separated from the applied volume and subsequently transferred into conventional Whatman 903 paper used in Dried Blood Spot (DBS) sampling. The presented concept allows accurate volume metering for lateral flow devices and is here designed to the specific purpose of metering blood spots for DBS analysis. The material costs for each chip are below 0.04 €.QC 20140613</p