Printed polymers, patterned paper

Printed polymers, patterned paper New way to bring the lab to the sample, instead of the sample to the lab In his research, Gert Salentijn investigated several approaches to decrease the dependence of chemical analysis on stationary laboratory facilities to make it more accessible, or as it is popularly phrased: “to bring the lab to the sample, instead of the sample to the lab”. This type of approach has been receiving a lot of attention recently, driven by a strong need in (low-resource) point-of-care settings for speed, flexibility and cost-effectiveness in disease diagnosis. This project was financed by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and aimed to develop disposable sample interfaces for on-site analysis with a portable mass-spectrometric instrument. At the core of the research lies a simple, yet elegant material that already has a long history in science, namely paper. By approaching this material in a number of different ways, amongst ...