The manipulation, trapping, detection and counting of cells in biological fluids is of critical importance to the areas of disease diagnosis, drug delivery and genomic applications in biomedical research. In recent times, this research has focussed on utilising the superior metering, separation, routing, mixing and incubation capabilities of centrifugal microfluidic “Lab on a Disk” (LOAD) technologies to tackle the challenge of handling numerous types of cells, proteins, genes and their reagents simultaneously. Furthermore, integrated optical detection systems are being developed in parallel to the aforementioned microfluidic technologies, to facilitate the accurate and inexpensive detection, imaging and counting of cells. This thesis describes a number of novel centrifugal microfluidic approaches towards the separation, capture and detection of white blood cells from whole blood. Firstly, a thorough review of the state-of-the art research in the areas of centrifugo-microfluidic cell handling and detection is outlined. Secondly, a series of physical size filtration and microcontact printing approaches for the capture and detection of biomimetic particles are described. Finally, the author assesses the suitability of sol-gel materials for waveguiding applications on disposable LOAD platforms and outlines areas of future work that would build upon the research undertaken in this thesis.