As a researcher at the Utah Center of Excellence for Biomedical Microfluidics, my partner and I designed and built a custom syringe pump for a personalized-medicine system we were developing to tailor ovarian-cancer treatments. Commerially available pumps were probitively expensive, could only actuate 10 syringes, and were horizontally oriented which resulted in undesirable bubbles entering flow lines. The device we designed and fabricated was inexpensive (< $500); actuated forty-eight syringes at once, maximally utilizing the microfluidic printhead thus enabling us to collect more data per experiment; and oriented the syringes vertically to help alleviate the bubble issue.

The Arduino C code I wrote to control the pump is available here.