Paper-Based Microfluidic Chips for At-Home Point-of-Care Nucleic Acid Testing: Applications and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews paper-based microfluidic chips for home nucleic acid testing, highlighting their potential and the challenges that need to be addressed for practical use.

Contribution

The paper provides a systematic review of recent advancements and challenges in integrating μPADs for home-based nucleic acid testing.

Findings

μPADs offer low-cost, portable solutions for home nucleic acid testing but face challenges in extraction efficiency and amplification stability.

Integration of material engineering and fluid control is critical for improving μPAD performance and practical application.

Standardized manufacturing and AI-assisted interpretation are proposed to enhance the feasibility of home-based diagnostics.

Abstract

Along with the growing demands for personalized medicine and public health surveillance, diagnostic technologies capable of rapid and accurate pathogen nucleic acid testing in home settings are becoming increasingly crucial. Paper-based microfluidic chips (μPADs) have emerged as a potential core platform for enabling molecular testing at home, owing to their advantages of low cost, portability, and independence from complex instrumentation. However, significant challenges remain in the current μPADs systems regarding nucleic acid extraction efficiency, isothermal amplification stability, and signal readout standardization, which hinder their practical and large-scale application. This review systematically summarizes recent research progress in μPADs for home-based nucleic acid testing from four key aspects: extraction–amplification–detection system integration, with a particular focus on the synergistic effects and development trends of critical technologies such as material engineering, fluid control, signal transduction, and intelligent readout. We further analyze typical application cases of this technology in the rapid screening of infectious disease. Promising optimization pathways are proposed, focusing on standardized manufacturing, cold-chain-independent storage, and AI-assisted result interpretation, aiming to provide a feasible framework and forward-looking perspectives for constructing home-based molecular diagnostic systems.

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