Automated Blood Component Separator

The objective of this project is to develop a portable, passive system for rapid and efficient blood component separation. While a number of macroscale devices (based on centrifugation) are routinely employed in laboratory settings to separate red blood cells (RBCs) and platelets from plasma, they are bulky, expensive, labor-intensive, and can compromise cellular integrity. An emerging class of microfabricated devices are being developed to address a variety of point-of-care style applications, but they are only capable of processing low-volume and/or extremely dilute blood samples. To address the practical limitations of both approaches, we have developed a straightforward"mesoscopic"solution to reliably separate a unit of undiluted whole blood into RBCs, platelets, and plasma within the same amount of time as conventional techniques, but with reduced energy requirements and cellular damage.