We met Dr. Holger Becker today. After a short visit to our lab he gave a very interesting talk about the state of the microfluidics industry.
If you are a member of the microfluidics community you probably know Dr. Becker from his regular focus articles in RSC Lab on a Chip. He began writing those as a way to engage the community on a debate to try to close the gap between academic applications and industry. I recommend reading them, he does a great job.
In his talk he started by introducing his company Microfluidic ChipShop and their fabrication capabilities. They have a wide set of capabilities as far as fabrication is concerned. They also pay special attention to standardize their fabrication. All their chips have a standard interface and layout that complies with mainstream existing ones such as 94 well plate dimensions.
Other aspects of their fabrication are their techniques and the materials they use. He reminded us that there is a plethora of materials to choose from and that even in an academic setting we should not limit ourselves to a couple of choices, if we do, we are limiting the manufacturability and mass production of our microfluidic devices. We all know this is true… but then again most of us are not material science people and sometimes we stay in our confort zone (a.k.a PDMS). In any case I came out of the talk thinking I should expand my knowledge in this regards. Hopefully, if I do, one day I’ll be hot embossing my devices.
During the Q&A someone asked about the need for a ‘killer app’. This is actually a recurrent topic among engineers in our field. Usually when most people talk about ‘killer apps’ they want to see a complete solution to a big problem and, if possible, completely solved by the almighty powers of microfluidics. They also tend to omit applications widely spread such as printer heads.
In my opinion we don’t need a ‘killer app’. Actually let me rephrase that. We do need a ‘killer app’, but we should not be looking for one. Killer apps are usually stumbled upon, not engineered. Instead we should be looking for killer microfluidic components. Components that work and that are standardized, like the standards in ChipShop for instance. I always say we engineers are grown up children who like to play with LEGO. Give us a bunch of pieces that we can snap together and interchange and we will come up with a ‘killer app’. In this case, however, we need to start by making those ‘pieces’.
