DropletBot®Digital Microfluidic Platform

In fields such as environmental monitoring, disease diagnosis, and drug development, the rapid and accurate analysis of biological samples is crucial. However, traditional analysis methods often face the following challenges: samples are susceptible to contamination, and manual operations are prone to errors; high reagent consumption is a disadvantage, especially for the analysis of precious biological samples; the operational process is cumbersome, and sample preparation and detection often require separate steps, leading to low efficiency.

In medical diagnostics and disease management, rapid and accurate protein biomarker detection is critical. Conventional methods like ELISA offer accuracy but suffer from lengthy procedures (2-3 hours), operational complexity, and high costs. Professor Zhang Shuailong and Fu Rongxin’s team at Beijing Institute of Technology recently unveiled a breakthrough in Nano Letters: an electroosmotic-driven digital optofluidics (e-DOF) platform. This innovation quantifies protein-binding nanoscale deformations via hyperspectral interferometry, slashing detection time to 15 minutes with 0.21 nM sensitivity (50× improvement over ELISA) and 100% clinical accuracy.

A multidisciplinary team from Beijing Institute of Technology, University of Toronto, and other institutions has published groundbreaking research titled "Automated Electroosmotic Digital Optofluidics for Rapid and Label-Free Protein Detection" in Nano Letters.