Boston-based microfluidic device manufacturer, Parallel Fluidics, has secured $7m in seed funding. The funds will be used to develop the company’s custom manufacturing platform, which allows clients to design and produce their own microfluidic devices at scale using a catalogue of prefabricated parts.
The MV-2 is Parallel’s latest product, a microvalve that enables products to work at the point-of-care, like a doctor’s office, clinic, or hospital, instead of only in laboratory environments.
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Since emerging in the 1980’s, microfluidics has been increasingly used throughout the healthcare industry in sectors from drug discovery to precision medicine or cell therapy. Microfluidics are systems that handle minute amounts of liquid within an enclosed system. It is typically used to transport, mix, separate, or otherwise process fluids, something which researchers previously had to do manually.
Speaking with Medical Device Network, Parallel Fluidics CEO Josh Gomes, said: “If you walked into a biology lab, say 50 years ago, you would have seen a team of scientists manually pipetting liquids back and forth to run whatever assay or experiment they might be working on. You walk into modern biology today, you see big fluid-handling robots moving around picking up lots of liquids at the same time, running lots of experiments in parallel.
“But there’s a bit of a physical limit to what you can do with that traditional kind of robotic automation. In mechanical engineering, you can turn around a custom part with fabrication within days to weeks. In microfluidics it’s just always a pain, we would have the design and the money, but we could not find people who could make microfluidics fast enough for us.”
The $7m funding was led by US investment firm J2 Ventures, with input from 8VC and Praxis, with the company planning to focus on rolling out its on-demand manufacturing platform. Microfluidic devices have found themselves present across the industry in multiple forms since their inception. Researchers at the University of Birmingham have found that the system could be used to speed up the production of 3D printed organs. Elsewhere, researchers at Columbia Engineering have developed a diagnostic test that uses microfluidics to detect Lyme disease.
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