Platelets are small blood components that are responsible for stopping bleeding. In the case of need, they are derived from blood donors. With the new scientific developments, artificial platelet production has become popular and lots of microfluidic based studies about it go on. Generally, the first step of platelet production research is designing and production of a microfluidic chips to investigate the platelet production from megakaryocytes. Due to fact that platelets are produced in bone barrow, researchers often mimic this structure for microfluidic chip designs. In this study, we fabricated microchips with different designs that mimic the bone marrow for platelet formation from megakaryocytes. We used a soft lithography technique for fabrication. Firstly, molds were fabricated with SU-8 negative epoxy photoresist. The feature size of the mold is down to 10 μm due to need of generating platelets. Then PDMS, an elastomer polymer, was poured onto the mold in order to fabricate the top of the chip. After the surface modifications with oxygen plasma, glass substrate and PDMS layer were brought into contact.

Keywords: microfluidics, soft lithography, microchip fabrication, platelet

Note: This work was supported by Research Fund of the Yildiz Technical University. Project number FCD- 2018-3150.