Biophysical Phenomenon-Based Separation of Platelet-Poor Plasma from Blood

The extraction or isolation of biological entities on a microfluidic platform has gained considerable attention in disease diagnostics, biomedical research, and point-of-care applications. The isolation of platelet-poor plasma from blood is the first and an essential step for applications in coagulation studies. The widely known clinical methods of platelet-poor plasma separation are based on centrifugation, which require a long processing time, high power, skilled personnel, and are incompatible with point-of-care devices. The microdevice utilized in this study facilitates the employment of various biophysical phenomena, hydrodynamic forces acting on cells, and geometrical features of the microdevice for its operation. The developed microdevice is compact in size, easy to fabricate, reliable, and exhibits clog-free operation. The microdevice isolates platelet-poor plasma with a purity of 94.7 ± 1.90%, having a platelet count of 968 ± 15 per μL plasma, while operating at an inlet flow rate of 0.4 mL/min. Furthermore, biological assessment of the platelet-poor plasma extracted from the microdevice confirms that the sample is completely free from white blood cells and have no impact on the shape and size of the platelets after microfluidic processing.