Lab-on-Chips made from children's toy

I'll be honest. I didn't know what Shrinky Dinks were until this past summer. I used them for their intended purpose, to "shrink" colorful works of art drawn on flexible plastic sheets into shiny, rigid works of art.

Never would I have thought to use them to scale channels and reservoirs down to a size suitable for microfluidics!

Michelle Khine, an associate professor at UC Irvine, came up with the idea. And her solution didn't stem from a problem with physics or the engineering process. It was simply because her lab couldn't immediately afford the specialized machines used to create the molds.

I took a class on microfluidic devices during my senior year and wrote a paper about them (see related post here). I actually got to watch a microfludic device get fabricated, and I found it's fairly complicated. It basically involves printing a series of masks and "etching" the mold out using light radiation. It requires a fair amount of precision as you are forming the actual micro-channels. The shrinky dink method, however, produces a mold in a matter of minutes.

While there are issues to work out, researchers say there are advantages to this process. It's much cheaper, faster, and works on printed metal patterns, opening up an infinite number of applications.

I really enjoy reading about engineering solutions like the one Professor Khine came up with. It's straightforward to implement, and it's thinking outside the box. Reminds me of that old joke about NASA spending millions of dollars developing a pen that writes in space while Russian cosmonauts used pencils. Only this time we look far less stupid.

Learn More: A children’s toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips [via MIT Technology Review]