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FOREWORD

With the cross-disciplinary development of MEMS technology, analytical chemistry, life sciences,
electronics, informatics and so on, microfluidics technology has been in progess, which has been valued as
one of the most important inventions affecting the human future. Blood is a very rare treasure, which has
been widely used in clinic diagnoses, medicinal therapy, life sciences research etc. Blood is deemed so
precious that is also called "red gold" because it can be sold for more than the cost of the same weight in
gold. However the components of the blood is complicated, including cells, sub-cells, nucleic acid, protein,
glucose, mineral ions, hormones, platelets and so on, which couldn’t be directly analyzed or used but need
be pre-treated. Traditional sample pre-treatment techniques are usually performed manually, at lower
integration, with time-consuming processes, and requiring large volumes of blood. The technologies of
blood sample pre-treatment microfluidic chip could not only resolve the above problems of the traditional
techniques, but also could potentially enable whole blood analyses for personal diagnoses and point-of-care
detection. Furthermore, the technologies of blood sample pre-treatment chip could play an important role
for the revolution of modern medicine.

The group of Prof. Dafu Cui has begun to study MEMS technology and microfluidics. After more than ten
years, various functional microfluidic chips such as blood separation chip, DNA chip, PCR chip, PDMS
sandwich type electrophoresis chip have been developed and published in many famous international
journals. As soon as “DNA extraction microfluidic chip integrated with porous matrix” was published, it
was highly concerned and evaluated by the French and American experts. “Whole blood sample
pre-treatment integrated microfluidic chip” has been cited so many times after it was published, which was
highly valued as “This is a significant step toward a true “lab on a chip” where multiple steps are combined
into a single device”.

Blood sample pre-treatment microfluidic chip and its technology is on the rise, which is far from universal.
The authors reviewed a large amount of literature, and combined ten years of the group’s research work to
write the eBook with rich, full of examples. The readers will get a comprehensive understanding of this
new technology, and also be provided the reference value for their research work. Furthermore the blood
sample pre-treatment microfluidic chip technology will be promoted and further developed in the future.

Prof. Daoben Zhu

Institute of Chemistry
Chinese Academy of Sciences