Integrated microfluidic devices for in vitro diagnostics at point of care

Given the continuous and growing demand for point of care (POC) diagnostic tests, attention has been shifted toward integration and miniaturization of laboratory protocols into “sample‐in‐answer‐out” devices. Microfluidic technologies have been considered an ideal solution to address the requirements of POC diagnostics since many laboratory functions can be miniaturized and incorporated onto a single integrated chip. In this review, we summarize the advances of integrated microfluidic devices for POC diagnostics in the last 3 years. Particularly, we summarize current materials used for microfluidic chip fabrication, discuss the innovation of versatile integrated microfluidic devices, especially the strategies for simplifying sample preparation in manual or self‐driven systems, and new detection methods of microfluidic chips. In addition, we describe new integrated microfluidic devices for POC diagnostics of protein‐targeted immunodiagnostics, nucleic acid molecular tests, and small molecule metabolites analysis. We also provide future perspectives and current challenges for clinical translation and commercialization of these microfluidic technologies. Microfluidic platforms represent one of the most promising strategies for POC diagnostics because they eliminate the need for costly instruments with high training requirements by integrating several conventional laboratory protocols into single analytical diagnostic step. Here, we review several major advances from the past 3 years in integrated microfluidic devices for POC diagnostic testing.