Low-cost Benchtop Equipment and Procedures for Organ-on-Chip Prototyping

The Organ on Chip (OoC) market is fast-growing and has the promise to drastically reduce the cost of developing drugs and the need for animal testing. However, the growth could be obstructed by the difficulties of scaling up production of developed prototypes. Most OoC prototypes are not suited for mass production because of the material used, namely polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). In this thesis a roadmap for the OoC prototyping process is proposed, which can be carried out in small labs without expensive equipment, and which can be directly scaled up to mass production. In the proposed roadmap the polymer cyclic olefin copolymer (COC) is used instead of PDMS. Expensive etching processes typically used to fabricate a mold are replaced by stereolithography printing and soft lithography. The final parts of the chip are soft embossed and for assembly thermal fusion bonding is suggested. These steps require relatively simple equipment, namely a stereolithography printer, a spin coater, a fume hood, and basic lab ware. Next to that, a press for embossing and bonding is required. Such a press is designed, fabricated, calibrated, and tested in this thesis. The press enables embossing and bonding experiments with high repeatability on a simple desktop and can be fabricated in roughly 2 - 3 days in a workshop with standard materials costing no more than € 250,-. Temperature of the compression platens can be controlled within 0.25oC precise up to 180oC. Compression forces up to 3.5 kN can be applied and an accuracy of ±32 N and ±80 N for forces up to respectively 1.3 kN and 2.0 kN can be reached. The performance of the press is tested by carrying out embossing experiments, which yielded replication accuracies comparable with literature for channels of 170 µm deep and 1 mm wide. Next to that, a protocol is produced for spin coating COC films with controllable thickness between 7.5 and 14 µm on top of a COC substrate.Mechanical Engineering | Micro and Nano Engineerin