A microfluidic substrate for testing biomarkers in nano litre volumes of plasma based on luminescence

Abstract

A microfluidic substrate comprises: a planar face; a blood inlet; and a blood processing region configured to receive blood from the blood inlet and supply processed blood to a blood processing region outlet. The microfluidic substrate further comprises a buffer supply circuit comprising a buffer inlet configured to receive buffer and a buffer outlet and a first processing circuit. The first processing circuit comprises: a first mixing region configured to receive and facilitate mixing of processed blood from the blood processing region outlet with buffer from the buffer outlet such as to provide a blood-buffer mixture via a mixing region outlet; and a first plurality of microfluidic detection chambers each containing a first dry reaction reagent and configured to receive via the mixing region outlet a volume of the blood-buffer mixture of less than 5 micro litres for dissolving the first dry reaction reagent, wherein the first dry reaction reagent is configured to trigger a luminescent reaction. The microfluidic substrate is non-transparent such as to prevent or at least substantially restrict photons from passing through the microfluidic substrate from any one of the first plurality of microfluidic detection chambers to any of the other first plurality of microfluidic detection chambers. Each microfluidic detection chamber of the first plurality of microfluidic detection chambers comprises a transparent aperture located in the planar face.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.