Grant: Idea to Innovation

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is one of most widely used techniques for analyzing biomolecular interactions in the health care and pharmaceutical industries. One of the most difficult challenges facing all SPR systems, and indeed all biosensing systems involving microfluidics, is the effective mixing of reagents at the microfluidic scale where flow is typically laminar. The objective of this proposal is to complete the development of a hybrid optical/microfluidic technology developed at the Université de Sherbrooke (UdeS) aimed at solving this very problem in surface plasmon resonance (SPR) systems. The microfluidic mixing is based on ""shear-vertical"" (Rayleigh) surface acoustic waves (SAW), which are mechanical waves that propagate on the surface of a material with oscillations in the plane normal to sensing surface. Because the SAW excitation electrodes can be deposited on a substrate in the same fabrication process as the metal layer used in SPR sensing, both technologies can be integrated on the same device and are thus highly compatible from an industrial fabrication point of view. The UdeS technology is designed as an add-on to bring increased measurement speed and precision to commercially available SPR systems.