Scaling laws for massively parallel microfluidics enable rapid construction of ten-million-scale natively paired antibody libraries.

Scaling laws reveal that flow deviations in large microfluidic networks grow quadratically with the number of parallel units, enabling the construction of ten-million-scale antibody libraries.

• Why it matters: Efficient processing of millions of cells is essential for discovering rare antibody-producing B cells, but flow nonuniformity limits the scalability of conventional microfluidic systems, hindering deep immune repertoire analysis.
• What they did: A hydrodynamic model and computational simulations were developed to understand and optimize flow in ladder-geometry and hierarchical microfluidic networks, leading to the design of high-throughput chips.
• The result: The new platform increased droplet generation rates up to 53.8-fold, processed 10 million cells in 40 minutes, and reduced reagent costs 14-fold, significantly advancing large-scale antibody library construction.