Transforming Microfluidics into Laboratory Automation

T he advent of microfluidic platforms equipped with novel nanomaterials and molecular processes within a biomedical context has been regarded as the transformative technology for a wide range of applications from clinical diagnostics and drug discovery to monitoring of therapeutic efficiency. The implementation of such technology into a format that is suitable for laboratory automation represents an essential step for translating fundamental research in microfluidics into reality in biomedicine. This issue of JALA is dedicated to highlighting emerging research areas in microfluidics and nanomaterials for driving a new paradigm in laboratory automation applications. In the past decades, scientific communities have identified novel physical phenomena and innovative materials in the microand nanodomains. Integrating these microfluidic techniques and nanomaterials has provided great promise in performing biomedical analysis with a volumetric scale that is orders of magnitude below traditional practice, reducing the