ME DEPARTMENTAL SEMINAR

Friday, January 12, 2007

Time TBA

Location TBA

Professor Albert Folch

Department of Bioengineering

University of Washington

"Lab-on-a-Chip Devices for Cell Biology Studies"

Abstract:

Cell culture technology is falling behind in the pace of progress. As animal and bacterial genomes and proteomes are being fully probed with DNA chips and a wide array of analytical techniques, a picture of cells with dauntingly complex inner workings is emerging. Yet cell culture methodology has remained basically unchanged for almost a century: it consists essentially of the immersion of a large population of cells in a homogeneous fluid medium. This approach is becoming increasingly expensive to scale up and cannot mimic the rich biochemical and biophysical complexity of the cellular microenvironment.

Microtechnology offers the attractive possibility of modulating the microenvironment of single cells and, for the same price, obtain data at high throughput for a small cost. Microfluidic or “Lab on a Chip” devices, in particular, promise to play a key role for several reasons: 1) the dimensions of microchannels can be comparable to or smaller than a single cell; 2) the unique physicochemical behavior of liquids confined to microenvironments enables new strategies for delivering compounds to cells on a subcellular level; 3) the devices consume small quantities of precious/hazardous reagents (thus reducing cost of operation/disposal); and 4) they can be mass-produced in low-cost, portable units. Not surprisingly, in recent years there has been an eruption of microfluidic implementations of a variety of traditional bioanalysis techniques. I will review the latest efforts of our laboratory in the development of cell-based microdevices for cell biology studies, such as neuromuscular synaptogenesis, axon guidance, and chemotaxis.

Bio:

Prof. Albert Folch received his B.S. in Physics from the University of Barcelona, Spain, in 1989. In 1994, he received his Ph.D. in Surface Science and Nanotechnology from the University of Barcelona Physics Dept. During his Ph.D., in 1990-91 he was also a visiting scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory working on Atomic Force Microscopy under Dr. Miquel Salmeron. From 1994-1996, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developing MEMS under the advice of Martin Schmidt (EECS Dept.) and Mark Wrighton (Chemistry). In 1997, he joined the laboratory of Dr. Mehmet Toner as a postdoctoral associate at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Engineering in Medicine to work on BioMEMS and tissue engineering. He has been at UW BioE since June 2000 where he is an Associate Professor. In 2001 he received a NSF Career Award.