By appropriate packaging, our smart materials can be organized in structures, optimized for processing liquid volumes in wide range between 10 µL and 100 L.

At small scale (volumes below 1 mL) applications include:

• Simple modules for sample purification or isolation in routine wet lab practice
• Integration with microfluidics systems for both sample processing and fluidic controls
• Low cost systems for diagnostics
• Single-cell manipulation and processing

At intermediate scale (between 1 and 100 mL) applications include:

• Research and analytical systems to study cell-containing suspensions
• Real-time monitoring of small-scale cell-producing bioreactors
• Medicine-dispensing systems

At large scale (above 0.1 L), the systems based on our platform may become indispensable in the biotechnology industry for manufacturing therapeutic antibodies, cells, and exosomes:

• Extraction of biologics either by processing the produced culture broth or directly from an operating reactor
• The platform permits multiple fast cycles of the active phase recovery

The first target for which the platform will be optimized is exosomes because of their importance in oncology and high therapeutic potential.

Our platform can be applied to samples within wide range of scales – from biomolecules to whole mammalian cells. This feature is achieved by the platform ability to produce various scales of porosity – from the size of small proteins (~1-10 nm) up to the size of large subcellular fragments (~1-10 µm). The pore size defines the size of the retained object.

The porosity scale can be changed as a part of the operating process, which opens fundamentally new approaches to sample preparation, such as enabling wide range of particle sizes to be sorted in a single process. A significant advantage is that our platform can be applied directly to cell-containing suspensions.

The platform can be combined with electric field, centrifugation, and pressure-driven fluidics. It can be both applied for non-specific selection and integrated with specific methods.

Our nanomaterials may be used for general microfluidic applications such as pumps, valves, and actuators for lab-on-chip. A unique advantage of our system is that independent control of every such element within the chip is possible without a direct contact. As the platform can be implemented with biocompatible material, the range of the lab-on-chip applications can be extended all the way to wearable and implantable devices.

Because biocompatibile and biodegradable embodiments of our platform are possible, it opens new options in drug delivery. We can foresee, for example, selective release of various substances from an implanted system under the external control.