SBIR Phase I: Enabling Daily Personalized Metabolomics with Low-Cost Capillary Electrophoresis

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to make daily biochemical health monitoring affordable and accessible for everyday consumers. Today, measuring the chemical signals that reflect how the body is responding to exercise, sleep, and nutrition requires expensive laboratory instruments, trained technicians, and days of waiting for results, placing this information out of reach for most people. This project will develop a low-cost, disposable microchip that enables automated chemical analysis of urine in minutes at home, producing daily insights into recovery, metabolism, and long-term health. The immediate application targets athletes seeking to optimize training and performance, but the underlying platform has the potential to support early detection of diseases and advance personalized preventive medicine at a population scale. This project thus serves the national interest by enabling citizens to be healthier and more productive, and strengthens American competitiveness in medical device and biotechnology innovation. The central technical challenge of this project is demonstrating that a single-use microfluidic chip, manufactured without a cleanroom and at a cost below two dollars, can perform capillary electrophoresis with laser-induced fluorescence detection at sufficient resolution to separate and quantify a panel of urinary free amino acids. Capillary electrophoresis separates molecules by size and electrical charge under an applied electric field; laser-induced fluorescence detects labeled compounds as they pass a measurement window. Achieving this performance in a low-cost disposable, rather than a benchtop laboratory instrument costing six figures, represents a significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art. This project will validate the feasibility of producing such chips using mask photolithography to define channels of 50 micrometers in width in a rigid mold, followed by casting in a flexible polymer and bonding to glass. Chips will be pre-loaded with a fluorescent labeling reagent and separation buffer, allowing a user to introduce a urine sample via a simple swab and receive a full amino acid profile within minutes. The research will address three technical objectives: demonstrating repeatable chip fabrication at target cost with consistent channel geometry; achieving sufficient separation resolution for the most chemically similar amino acid pairs in the panel; and validating that pre-loaded reagents remain stable under expected storage conditions. A design-of-experiments approach will optimize channel length, electric field strength, and buffer concentration. Results will establish the scientific and manufacturing foundation for a platform capable of delivering longitudinal, personalized biochemical data to consumers through daily non-invasive measurement. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.