The microfluidics of the eccrine sweat gland, including biomarker partitioning, transport, and biosensing implications.

By Z. Sonner, E. Wilder, J. Heikenfeld, G. Kasting, F. Beyette, D. Swaile, F. Sherman, J. Joyce, J. Hagen, N. Kelley-Loughnane and 1 more. Biomicrofluidics, 2015

614 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Non-invasive and accurate access of biomarkers remains a holy grail of the biomedical community. Human eccrine sweat is a surprisingly biomarker-rich fluid which is gaining increasing attention. This is especially true in applications of continuous bio-monitoring where other biofluids prove more challenging, if not impossible. However, much confusion on the topic exists as the microfluidics of the eccrine sweat gland has never been comprehensively presented and models of biomarker partitioning into sweat are either underdeveloped and/or highly scattered across literature. Reported here are microfluidic models for eccrine sweat generation and flow which are coupled with review of blood-to-sweat biomarker partition pathways, therefore providing insights such as how biomarker concentration changes with sweat flow rate. Additionally, it is shown that both flow rate and biomarker diffusion determine the effective sampling rate of biomarkers at the skin surface (chronological resolution). The discussion covers a broad class of biomarkers including ions (Na(+), Cl(-), K(+), NH4 (+)), small molecules (ethanol, cortisol, urea, and lactate), and even peptides or small proteins (neuropeptides and cytokines). The models are not meant to be exhaustive for all biomarkers, yet collectively serve as a foundational guide for further development of sweat-based diagnostics and for those beginning exploration of new biomarker opportunities in sweat.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ecb3dfaff71529c8362c9b9692161b3ba78e9fd2

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In Biomedical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

A Soft, Wearable Microfluidic Device for the Capture, Storage, and Colorimetric Sensing of Sweat (2016, background): “As a representative biofluid, sweat is of particular interest owing to its relative ease of noninvasive collection and its rich content of important biomarkers including electrolytes, small molecules, and proteins (13, 14).”
Lab-on-Skin: A Review of Flexible and Stretchable Electronics for Wearable Health Monitoring. (2017, background): “analyte for pH, mineral ion, glucose, water, lactic acid, and urea concentrations.(35) Additionally,”
Regional and correlative sweat analysis using high-throughput microfluidic sensing patches toward decoding sweat (2019, background): “As both Na+ and K+ in sweat share Cl− as their primary counter ion, a balance between the cation levels is consistent with the fluid’s overall charge neutrality (21).”
Evolution of Wearable Devices with Real-Time Disease Monitoring for Personalized Healthcare (2019, background): “As a typical body fluid, sweat is especially important because it contains large amounts of important biomarkers, including electrolytes, small molecules, and proteins [68].”