Best poster award

Congratulations to Sara Falghera for winning the Best Poster Prize of our 2024 symposium!

Miniaturized asymmetrical flow field flow fractionation on a soft thermoplastic chip

asymmetrical flow field flow fractionation, tangential flow filtration, microfluidics, biotherapeutics, nanomedicines

Salmon Hugo (1) (2), Falghera Sara, Mignet Nathalie

1 – Matière et Systèmes Complexes ( France), 2 – Toxicité environnementale, cibles thérapeutiques, signalisation cellulaire ( France)

In the quest for better purification/separation by size of nanometric objects, asymmetrical flow field flow fractionation (AF4) is emerging as an alternative to steric exclusion chromatography, a routine method for bioproduction in particular for therapeutics. With a wider dynamic range of separation sizes, low shear, controllability and the ability to get rid of salts and molecules below a threshold of 1 to 500kDa, the technique is still relatively uncommon in laboratories and industry due to its price and complexity. The miniaturization of these devices would not only overcome these logistical aspects, but would also enable enhanced analytical performance.

We propose a membrane encapsulation design and fabrication method to reproduce an AF4 device in a microfluidic chip. We use thermoforming to manufacture a device optimized for contact surface area to encapsulate a polycarbonate membrane with a porosity of 10 nm, ideal for filtering extracellular-based biotherapeutics. We carry out the first hydrodynamic demonstrations of fluorescent particles and show that pressure controller response times are 10 times faster than with a conventional quaternary pump system. These initial results confirm the encapsulation and control of the chip, paving the way for the focusing and elution stages.

Our 2024 symposium will take place on November 28th at the Conseil Régional d’Île-de-France (Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine). It will be an exciting opportunity for the entire DIM BioConvS community to come together, exchange ideas, and catalyse new collaborations in synthetic biology and biotherapies.