Additional contributions from: Nobel Symposium 162 - Microfluidics

On June 5, 2017, the long awaited date for the Nobel Symposium in Microfluidics at Sånga Säby conference resort in the countryside west of Stockholm had arrived. Full of expectations, the hosts for the symposium, Johan Elf and Thomas Laurell, welcomed attendees to an exciting four days Odyssee through the discoveries and developments within the microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip field.

The Nobel Foundation’s Symposium programme was initiated in 1965 and since then over 160 symposia have taken place. With the Nobel symposium nr 162, we had the ambition to cover the past, current and future developments of microfluidics; a highly challenging task as there are many excellent researchers in this area and only thirty slots in the program.

We tried to cover the early breakthrough contributions to the field, important developments over the years and applications of microfluidics that now propagate in vastly different directions both as industrial components or processes and as tools and methods supporting fundamental research.

The opening lecture of the symposium was given by Professor George Whitesides who set the stage and the level for the week to come with statements that challenged the auditorium in terms of questioning why we do what we do and how the research performed can benefit society both in terms of creating industries, facilitate health care and benefit mankind.

The symposium program was mixed with some of the early pioneers in the field featuring Andreas Manz, Jed Harrison, Michael Ramsey and Richard Mathies, who all reflected on the early days of microchip based separations and the boom and hype created in the era of CE driven genome sequencing. A large part of the symposium highlighted the different development routes that the microfluidics field subsequently followed as material and fabrication technologies matured, enabling simple manufacturing of microfluidic circuits without the need for clean room facilities.

Important contributions and application developments were highlighted by Takehiko Kitamori, James Landers, Klavs Jensen, Albert van den Berg, Luke Lee and not least David Weitz, who took us through the decades describing a research branch that went from science fiction, through the stages of infinite promise, brisk reality check and finally scientific maturity and commercial and industrial implementation. That the field will continue to thrive also in the future was made clear by Sindy Tang, Amy Herr, Paul Blainey, Tomas Knowles, Andrew DeMello, Hang Lu, Yoon-Kyoung Cho and Roland Zengerle who convinced the audience that the only real limits are those of your imagination and that indeed microfluidics can solve real problems.

Mehmet Toner demonstrated that microfluidics has a place also in the macro-world, showing the ability to scale microfluidics to clinical applications still benefitting from the high performance of microscale. David Bebee followed the “make it simple” mantra and demonstrated important applications of autonomous microfluidic systems and simple solutions to clinical applications. Shoji Takeuchi outlined new strategies to address the unmet needs in regenerative medicine and Jay Han’s pulled the attention to microfluidic opportunities in chemical engineering for molecular and ionic separations.

That the microfluidic techniques are increasingly used as workhorses in biological research was obvious from the presentations by Stephen Quake, Jianhua Qin, Sabeth Verpoorte, Petra Dittrich and Joel Voldman, while Henrik Bruus presented theoretical aspects of microscale acoustofluidics and novel acoustophysics only revealed in confined space.

Having had the opportunity to gather this extraordinary line up of internationally top researchers in the field of microfluidics was a once in a life time event and indeed the euphoria was mutually contagious between the participants, sparking lively discussions late at night and throughout the week, with full attendance until the very end. No one wanted to miss anything! In summary, we as symposium chairs (Johan and Thomas) were privileged to get the opportunity to organize Nobel Symposium No. 162, devoted to the topic of Microfluidics.

To give the entire research community an opportunity to sample the science presented at the symposium we have compiled a symposium volume that reflects the major messages conveyed by our invited speakers. We are deeply grateful to the effort that our participants put into writing their lecture notes/abstracts. Most notably we all acknowledge the efforts that Irmeli Barkefors put into all the practical arrangements and herding of the participants throughout the week.

The Nobel Symposia

The Nobel Foundation’s Symposium programme was initiated in 1965. Since then about 160 symposia have taken place. The Nobel Symposia programme has obtained a good reputation and now plays a significant role in the international exchange of knowledge and experience.

The financial base for the Nobel Symposia programme con

This content is AI-processed based on open access ArXiv data.