“Railed microfluidics” is a fully deterministic way of guiding microstructures inside a fluidic channel. Using railed microfluidics, we achieved fluidic self-assembly of various complex heterogeneous microstructures. By transporting many different microstructures to the exact assembly sites, complex 1D and 2D systems are assembled without wasting a single microstructure.
We have developed a material called ‘M-Ink’, the color of which is tunable by magnetically changing the periodicity of the nanostructure. The magnetic particle within this material, which is a key factor of enabling color changes is self-assembled in optimized chemosynthesis condition. This controllable and scalable structural color printing technique may have a significant impact on color production for general consumer goods.
Micro-sized inorganic light-emitting diode (MicroLED) has garnered much attention as the key ingredient in next generation displays. MicroLED display has benefits such as very low power consumption, great external quantum efficiency, deep color expression and long lifespan without burn-in. To produce an ultra-high definition (UHD) MicroLED display, tens of millions of micro LED chips must be transferred and individually operated as RGB pixels. The bottleneck for commercializing MicroLED display are the difficulties in assembling millions of chips with low cost, high throughput, and high accuracy. Therefore, we are developing a Fluidic Self-Assembly technology that can be applied to MicroLED displays.
We propose a novel handling technique of chemical substances termed ‘partipetting’, which allows the one-step pipetting of various chemical-laden hydrogels. We pipette and assemble various types of encoded chemical-laden microparticles in microwell arrays in parallel. The combination of this heterogeneous particle chip and a cell chip induces the release of the chemicals from the hydrogels and, eventually, the chemicals treat the targets.
Utilizing our partipetting method, we suggest a drug screening platform that effects a high-throughput and multiplexed assay into reality as a game changer in the drug development industry. Medicine for incurable diseases such as degenerative arthritis or Alzheimer’s disease is not yet found, because of complicate underneath mechanisms. Thus finding effective drugs for such diseases requires highly multiplexed contents from the response of treated subjects. Our platform selects effective drugs based on not only cell morphology but also altered gene expression levels. Here we make the use of labor-free drug treatment onto microarray and in situ sequencing method. The responses to specific drugs and the spatial information are automatically linked in the platform. Therefore, the effect of corresponding drugs can be analyzed in a high-throughput and multiplexed manner. Further, we envision that it can incorporate various imaging-based assays, such as cell-to-cell interactions between heterogeneous population on a single chip, proceeding to in-depth study of effect of candidate drugs to target in-vitro tissue models.
