More critically, the intrinsic material properties
of native PDMS can lead to affects such as evaporation, leeching and absorption of a flowed liquid sample [14] which
perhaps makes it unsuitable for repeatable, robust microfluidic biological and chemical analysis applications. These
limitations can be overcome through post processing of the material, but adds an additional backend processing stage
and therefore makes it more undesirable for commercial manufacturing. This therefore begs the question to the
research community over its continued prevalence in microfluidic applications and research efforts must either focus
on the up-scaled manufacturing of PDMS or shift to a more intensive evaluation of alternative fabrication materials
of choice for lab-on-a-chip application, such as low-cost polymers.