George Mason University and North Carolina company Phase Inc. have been awarded a National Science Foundation STTR grant to develop a new class of 3D printed microfluidic devices. The goal is to carry the technology out of the research lab and into wider use, yielding a more dependable route to the tools that organ-on-a-chip development and human-centered biomedical research increasingly depend on.
The collaboration merges the extracellular vesicle (EV) biology work of College of Science professor Ramin M. Hakami’s group with the bioengineering and materials expertise of College of Engineering and Computing associate professor Remi Veneziano’s group, building on a microfluidic EV platform the two teams previously developed and published together. Phase brings its ambition to build a fully automated, end-to-end system spanning custom device design, scalable 3D printed polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) chip production and automated fluid handling.
Why Microfluidics Matter Now
Microfluidic devices route tiny volumes of fluid through miniature channels to recreate biological conditions at the cellular scale, offering a more realistic model of human biology than conventional flat cell cultures. That makes them valuable across drug discovery, disease research and toxicology, and increasingly relevant as the FDA moves to phase out certain animal-testing requirements in favor of more human-relevant methods.
The catch is manufacturing: producing complex PDMS devices today typically demands cleanrooms, manual tuning and repeated trial-and-error. The NSF-backed effort aims to break that bottleneck using thermal and curing models that predict how PDMS behaves during printing, allowing print parameters to be optimized before a device is ever made.
“This partnership helps us move one step closer to a fully automated, scalable microfluidic platform,” said Jeff Schultz, principal investigator and co-founder of Phase. “Our goal is to make microfluidic technology more reproducible and more accessible to researchers and companies working to develop better human-relevant models.”
Testing Devices for Accuracy and Biological Function
George Mason’s researchers will evaluate the printed devices for dimensional accuracy, surface quality, batch-to-batch consistency and biological performance, including testing a chip designed to study EV function. EVs are cell-released nanoparticles central to communication between cells, carry regulatory roles in diseases ranging from cancer to infectious and neurological disorders, and hold strong potential for drug delivery.
“Being able to rapidly and cost‑effectively prototype and fabricate custom microfluidic devices will significantly enhance our capacity to design relevant microphysiological systems and will help broaden access to this technology to many research laboratories” said Veneziano.
Industrializing How Microfluidic Chips Are Made
Phase isn’t testing drugs or growing tissue, it’s building the manufacturing layer beneath that work. Complex PDMS chips still depend on cleanrooms and hands-on tuning, which locks out small labs and makes results hard to reproduce. Phase aims to turn chip fabrication into an automated, repeatable process.
Phase isn’t alone in chasing that production layer. Recently, additive manufacturing firm Intrepid Automation partnered with Rapid Fluidics to scale U.S.-based microfluidic production, targeting the same bottleneck between lab prototypes and high-volume, regulatory-compliant output, with early results reportedly cutting production time from six weeks to minutes.
The other front is the printing process itself. Missouri University of Science and Technology developed a faster, light-based method for producing organs-on-a-chip, using a self-assembling resin to form intricate microchannels in one pass, an attempt, like Phase’s, to make chip fabrication faster, cleaner and easier to scale.
Few players are attacking microfluidic manufacturing itself; most work happens downstream, testing on finished chips. Phase is betting that predictive, software-driven fabrication is what pulls the field out of the cleanroom.
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Featured image shows a microfluid device. Photo via George Mason University.
