Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/T02584/01
Title:	Smart surfaces for HTT
Principal Investigator:	quirke, Professor N
Other Investigators:	de Mello, Professor AJ
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:	Air Liquide (France) Central Research Laboratories Ltd Dassault Systemes Imperial College London National Physical Laboratory NPL
Department:	Chemistry
Organisation:	Imperial College London
Scheme:	Faraday (PreFEC)
Starts:	26 February 2005	Ends:	25 August 2008	Value (£):	347,102
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Analytical Science Complex fluids & soft solids
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Chemicals Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
Advances in molecular biology, human genetics and functional genomics continue to produce increasing numbers of molecular targets available for therapeutic intervention. This, coupled with major increases in compound collections produced by combinatorial technologies, is driving innovation in high throughput screening (HTS). The urgent need is to go beyond current technology (>1 00,000 assays per day). A fast developing area is 'lab on a chip' devices and microfluidics with sub-microliter volumes. These systems have unique properties, as illustrated by the development of rapid separationbased assays in microfluidics systems. The serious challenges are largely in the area of liquids handling.We wish to address the current challenges in ultra-HTS and to prepare the ground to go well beyond current expectations to nanofluidic devices based on nanopatterned surfaces and create 'hyper-high throughput technology, or h-HTT' by examining novel ideas for driving colloidal fluids along nanopatterned surfaces involving gradients in wettability. Using, eg electrowetting, we intend to generate a switchable flow that is purely chemically driven. Our work suggests there exist many similarities between fluids in pores and fluids adsorbed on stripes. This suggests the possibility that similar increases in reaction rates to those observed in nanopores can be achieved on striped surfaces without the associated pressure drop. Such active nanopatterned surfaces should allow the development of new technology to make microreactors via virtual nano-wells, pipelines and valves .
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Organisation Website:	http://www.imperial.ac.uk