16. Microfluidic Technologies Using Oral Factors: Saliva-Based Studies

Microfluidics, a technology that manipulates fluids into channels smaller than one cell to several millimeters, is an emerging new era in dental/oral and medical research. It has the potential to integrate complex systems in a miniaturized state by controlling the flow rate, providing a dynamic environment, conducting experiments in parallel, and monitoring analytes at cellular scale. This chapter highlights the applications of microfluidics using oral factors, such as saliva. In this area, point-of-care (POC) diagnostic systems have been made based on saliva as an easy, accessible, and sophisticated diagnostic fluid, which are reviewed in this chapter. Saliva testing has the potential to monitor some overall systemic illnesses, as well as oral diseases, which can be integrated in microfluidic devices. This chapter evaluates such microfluidics-based methods to save time and cost over traditional ones.

More specifically, microfluidic systems can be employed for detecting pathogenic bacteria and other analytes of interest in physiological disorders, controlled release of drugs, biofilm bacterial formation, and early detection of cancers—including oral cancers. In recent years, these systems have even exploited microelectronics, biotechnologies, and integration into smartphones to provide portable and miniaturized analytical devices, all of which are discussed in this chapter.