Swiss NanoConvention 2019 Best Poster Award

Results in brief

The work was carried out within the ongoing European research project ACEnano. The goal of the project is to bring confidence, adaptability, and clarity to nanomaterial risk assessment. CSEM developed an automated sample preparation system that makes nanomaterials solubility measurement—identified as a key element of nanosafety—considerably easier. The portable system can handle 24 assays in parallel within a standard-sized disposable microfluidic well plate in a fast, reliable, and cost-efficient manner.

In order to measure the solubility of nanomaterials in solvents of interest, including biological media, the system allows one to manually or automatically fill a custom, disposable well plate, to mix and incubate the nanomaterials, and to automatically extract the solutions and introduce them into an external analytical instrument—a dedicated mass spectrometer, for example, in order to measure particle size distribution and concentration (analytical part currently also being developed within ACEnano).