Bio-Inspired Cilia Mix Medical Reagents At Small Scales
July 2, 2009 – 2:03 pm
The artificial cilia are flexible rubber fingers less than 1/100 of an inch long, and 1/1000 of an inch wide. The tips shown here vibrate 65 times per second. Image courtesy of the University of Washington
From the wire: The equipment used for biomedical research is shrinking, but the physical properties of the fluids under investigation are not changing. This creates a problem: the reservoirs that hold the liquid are now so small that forces between molecules on the liquid’s surface dominate, and one can no longer shake the container to mix two fluids. Instead, researchers must bide their time and wait for diffusion to occur.
Scientists at the University of Washington (UW) hope to speed up biomedical reactions by filling each well with tiny beating rods that mimic cilia, the hairlike appendages that line organs such as the human windpipe, where they sweep out dirt and mucus from the lungs. The researchers created a prototype that mixes tiny volumes of fluid or creates a current to move a particle, according to research published in the journal Lab on a Chip. They used a novel underwater manufacturing technique to overcome obstacles faced by other teams that have attempted to build a similar device. Read more…
New techniques in minimally invasive surgery (MIS) are placing ever-greater demands on extruders of medical tubing. Fewer but larger patient access points are challenging design engineers to produce devices with a maximum amount of inner working space. Easy unfettered articulation of the device inside the body is also on the surgeon’s spec sheet. Extruding tubing that meets this set of demands traditionally has been fraught with difficulty. 
From the wire: 
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