Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship 2021

Lab on a Chip and Dolomite are proud to sponsor the sixteenth Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship, to honour and support the up and coming, next generation of scientists who have significantly contributed to the understanding or development of miniaturised systems.


This year’s Lectureship will be presented at µTAS 2021 with the recipient receiving a prize of US$3,000.

The Lectureship consists of the following elements:

  • A prize of US$3,000. No other financial contribution will be offered
  • A certificate recognising the winner of the lectureship
  • The awardee is required to give a short lecture at the µTAS 2021 event

Eligibility Criteria

To be eligible for the lectureship, candidates must:

  • Have completed their PhD
  • Be actively pursuing an independent research career on miniaturised systems.
  • Be at an early-mid career stage of their independent career (typically this will be within 15 years of completing their PhD, but appropriate consideration will be given to those who have taken a career break or followed a different study path).

Nomination process

To be considered for the 2021 lectureship, the following must be sent to the Editorial Office

  • A letter of recommendation with the candidate’s accomplishments and why the lectureship is deserved.
  • The nominee must be aware that he/she has been nominated for this lectureship.
  • A complete nomination form (includes list of the candidate’s relevant publications or recent work, candidate’s scientific CV, and full contact details)
  • Nominations from students and self-nominations are not permissible.

Selection criteria and judging process

  • Nominations must be made via email to loc-rsc@rsc.org using the Dolomite/Lab on a Chip Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship nomination form and a letter of recommendation.
  • The decision on the winner of the lectureship will be made by a panel of judges comprising a representative from Dolomite and members from the Lab on a Chip Editorial Board, coordinated by the Executive Editor of Lab on a Chip.
  • The award is for outstanding contributions to the understanding or development of miniaturised systems. This will be judged mainly through their top 1-3 papers and/or an invention documented by patents/or a commercial product. Awards and honorary memberships may also be considered.

Update: The nomination deadline has been extended from 31st May 2021 to 30th June 2021.

Nomination Deadline: 30 June 2021


Download Nomination form here 

Dolomite Microfluidics a leading provider of microfluidics-based solutions for a range of applications including drug encapsulation, droplet manufacture and particle generation. They manufacture complete systems as well as individual modular components to balance ease of use with flexibility.

 

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Emerging Investigator Series – Aaron Streets

Lab on a Chip is very excited to introduce our most recent Emerging Investigator, Dr Aaron Streets! 

Aaron received a Bachelor of Science in Physics and a Bachelor of Arts in Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. He completed his PhD in Applied Physics at Stanford University with Dr. Stephen Quake. Aaron then went to Beijing, China as a Whitaker International Postdoctoral Fellow and a Ford postdoctoral fellow and worked with Dr. Yanyi Huang in the Peking University BIOPIC institute. Aaron joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in Bioengineering in 2016. He is currently a core member of the Biophysics Program and the Center for Computational Biology and he is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator. Aaron has received the NSF Early Career award and was recently named a Pew Biomedical Scholar.

You can read Aaron’s article, μCB-seq: microfluidic cell barcoding and sequencing for high-resolution imaging and sequencing of single cells, here.

If you’d like to know more about Aaron and his research, read the short interview with him below!


Your recent Emerging Investigator Series paper focuses on microfluidic cell barcoding and sequencing. How has your research evolved from your first article to this most recent article?

My first publication used a microfluidic-based dynamic light scattering apparatus to investigate protein crystallization. While this study relied on the integration of microfluidic control and optical analysis, it was really focused on the physics of biological macromolecule phase transitions. No cells, no sequencing, not even any microscopy.  The continuous thread that has persisted through my research has been the integration of multilayer microfluidic circuits with advanced optical analysis techniques, however we now take advantage of this technology to study single cells. This means that we rely on a lot of additional experimental and computational tools upstream and downstream of the microfluidics, including interfacing directly with biological samples that are input into our devices, as well as the library preparation, high-throughput sequencing, and ultimately genomic data analysis that are essentially the device outputs. So, while “lab-on-chip” technology is still at the core of our research, we rely heavily on a “chip-in-a-lab” paradigm.

What aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment?

After a decade-and-a-half of working with microfluidic technology it is extremely energizing to see microfluidics percolate into all corners of biology and the biomedical sciences. It is particularly exciting to see microfluidic platforms become the primary driving technology that has advanced the field of single-cell biology. From the integrated microfluidic circuits that provided the first commercial single-cell RNA-seq platforms, to the droplet microfluidics and microwell technology that has brought ultra-high-throughput single-cell genomics to the masses and has fuelled the Human Cell Atlas Project. In our lab, we are excited about taking a deeper dive into single-cell measurements, and instead of optimizing throughput, really pushing the information content that can be extracted from a single cell. One of the beautiful aspects of integrated microfluidic circuits is that they pair incredibly well with advanced microscopy techniques while facilitating single-cell manipulation and sequential molecular biology protocols. We are excited about using these capabilities to make multimodal measurements on single cells, connecting genomic information to the spatial organization of molecules and other morphological phenotypes that are probed more efficiently with light.

In your opinion, what is the biggest advantage to using the μCB-seq platform compared to other methods?

It is easy to take a high-resolution image of a single cell, and it is easy (nowadays) to amplify and sequence the RNA or DNA from a single cell. It is still challenging, however, to take a high-resolution image of a single cell, and then pluck that same cell from the microscope slide and sequence it.  Microfluidic cell barcoding and sequencing (μCB-seq) provides a way to do just that for many cells in parallel. With this platform, we are really just using microfluidic chambers to help keep track of which cell was imaged before sequencing. To make this work, we use DNA barcodes that are pre-loaded into the microfluidic device so that each single-cell imaging chamber gets a unique cell barcode. After imaging each cell, that unique barcode gets imprinted into the cDNA from each respective cell so that we can pool all the cDNA from the lanes of our device and make a single sequencing library. After sequencing, the barcode will tell us which transcripts came from which cell, linking gene expression to image data.

What do you find most challenging about your research?

The most challenging aspects of our work tend to be figured out by the PhD students. These are the details you can’t find in a textbook like how to make a device robust to thermal cycling while under a microscope, or where did the cDNA go, or why isn’t this thing working? The truth is that there is a significant up-front investment in resources and time to get these platforms functional. Furthermore, depending on the type of microscopy, many of these tools cannot be ported into other labs. Once we get something like μCB-seq to the proof-of-principle stage there is another set of obstacles to make it a robust technology that we can train collaborators to use efficiently, so that the technology can have impact. Getting these tools into the hands of people who want to use them is still a non-trivial challenge, especially as the front-end and back-end of these experiments require more and more equipment and expertise. 

At which upcoming conferences or events may our readers meet you?

I would love to see everyone at the Physics and Chemistry of Microfluidics Gordon Research Conference in 2021. But if we can’t see each other in Tuscany, I look forward to seeing you on Zoom!

How do you spend your spare time? 

These days? Good question. I enjoy reading science fiction. I am an avid basketball fan. I love listening to live music. So I guess the answer is… reading science fiction.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

I would be a world-famous artist. (Are we allowed to choose how successful we would be? Or just the profession?) Ok, I would be an artist… and a bartender. I studied art in undergrad at UCLA and I always imagined an alternate career making paintings and sculptures and art installations. 


If you’re interested in other articles in our Emerging Investigator Series, the whole collection can be found here

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Digital microfluidics for handling picoliters

Just another day at the chemistry lab. Get in, make sure to wear PPE thoroughly, grab a pipette set, start reading, and applying the steps of the experiment. Pipette hundreds of microliters of a solution, done. Pipette tens of microliters of another solution, no problems. Pipette several picoliters of …, what? Wait!  Can we pipet sub-microliter size liquids? The answer will be yes at this time, but we will twist it a bit. As the name suggests, microfluidics is the art of handling tiny amounts of liquids. Can it be helpful when it comes to handling sub-microliter size droplets?

Since the early 2000s, digital microfluidics (DMF) has been proposed as a more versatile candidate in sample processing applications. Most DMF devices use electric field application to control the displacement of droplets, which are separated from the underlying electrodes via a dielectric layer and an nm-thick hydrophobic layer. Once we actuate an electrode, the contact angle, and in turn, the hydrophobicity, of a droplet sitting on top of the electrode decreases due to surface energy changes. This would be a golden moment because if we actuate a neighboring electrode now, the droplet will displace towards the activated electrode. Based on this principle, we can transport, dispense, merge, and split droplets in a digital microfluidic platform.

One constraint of current digital microfluidic systems is that droplet volume is limited by electrode area. Droplets can only be reliably split and displaced above a certain volume as they will not be capable of displacing towards another electrode if their contact area is too small. Working with smaller scale electrodes does not solve the problem either, but it makes evaporation-related problems more pronounced.

In the recent Lab on a Chip article of researchers from the University of Macau (CN) and the University of Lisboa (PT) demonstrated the controllable ejection of satellite droplets to create a digital microfluidic platform that is capable of transporting picoliter-volume droplets. Precise control of ejection position and volume was made possible using a narrow electrode, or a jetting bar, which focused the area of high voltage AC actuation. During a rapid change in electric field intensity beyond the contact angle saturation threshold voltage, the excess energy is released by the ejection of satellite droplets. The dispensing droplet would release picoliter sized volumes onto the jetting bar which were then collected by another droplet moving over the jetting bar (Fig. 1). Volumes between 5 pL to 20 nL can be produced by repeatedly dispensing and collecting picoliter-size droplets at the jetting bar. The dispensed volume could also be controlled by changing increasing the width of the jetting bar for greater volumes. Dispensing volume can also be carefully controlled by the strength of the electric field, the actuation frequency, and actuation time.

The authors showed that the picoliter- volume dosing system can be used in a dequenching assay. Fluorescent DNA probes specific to S. aureus were delivered to droplets containing S. aureus and K. pneumonia using this assay. The dispensed satellite droplets successfully delivered the DNA probes to the droplets. The authors built a quantitative relationship between the degree of fluorescence and volume delivered in the S. aureus droplet accordingly. The authors think that this new technique may make microfluidics more accessible in sample preparation for clinical and lab studies in the future.

Figure 1. The dispensing drop releases satellite droplets under high voltage AC actuation of the jetting bar. The satellite droplets are then taken up by another droplet, facilitating volume transfer without the merging of either the dispensing or pickup-up droplet.

 

To download the full article for free* click the link below:

Turning on/off satellite droplet ejection for flexible sample delivery on digital microfluidics

Haoran Li, Ren Shen, Cheng Dong, Tianlan ChenYanwei Jia, Pui-In Mak and Rui P. Martins, Lab Chip, 2020, Lab on a Chip Hot Articles

DOI: 10.1039/D0LC00701C

 

About the Webwriters

Burcu Gumuscu is an assistant professor in BioInterface Science Group at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. She strives for the development, fabrication, and application of smart biomaterials to realize high-precision processing in high-throughput microfluidic settings. She specifically focuses on the design and development of lab-on-a-chip devices containing hydrogels for diversified life sciences applications. She is also interested in combining data-mining and machine learning techniques with hypothesis-driven experimental research for future research.

 

Miguel FaaseMiguel Faase is a Ph.D. student in BioInterface Science Group at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. He focuses on the development of high-throughput screening platforms for biomaterial research under the supervision of Burcu Gumuscu.

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Announcing our new Editor-in-Chief – Aaron Wheeler

We are delighted to announce that in January 2021, Professor Aaron Wheeler (University of Toronto, Canada) will take over as the new Editor-in-Chief for Lab on a Chip.

Professor Wheeler is Canada Research Chair in Microfluidic Bioanalysis at the University of Toronto. He has been recognized with a number of honors including the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from the Canadian National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Arthur F. Findeis Award from the American Chemical Society, and the Joseph Black Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Professor Wheeler’s research group develops microfluidic tools to solve problems in chemistry, biology, and medicine.

Aaron has been an Associate Editor for Lab on a Chip since 2013, and we are delighted that he will continue to handle submissions for Lab on a Chip. Aaron’s experience and knowledge of the journal and its community, combined with his academic experience, mean he will be a fantastic Editor-in-Chief for the journal.

“I’m honored to be taking up the duties of Editor-in-Chief for Lab on a Chip, “Perhaps uniquely relative to other journals, Lab on a Chip played a critical role in the birth and growth of a new field of research. Since the year 2000, the journal has been the ‘home’ for the best that the community has to offer, and I look forward to continuing that tradition going forward” says Aaron, “I am in awe of the diversity of topics that the Lab on a Chip community has made an impact in, be that cells or gels, soil or oil, or trees or bees, there is a Lab on a Chip for that. I can’t imagine a community that is more fun to be a part of.”

This news does of course mean that Professor Abe Lee will be standing down as Editor-in-Chief of Lab on a Chip. Professor Lee has served on the Editorial Board of Lab on a Chip for eleven years, first as an Editorial Board member, then an Associate Editor and finally as our Editor-in-Chief, and we are extremely grateful to Abe for his creativity and leadership throughout this period. We wish him all the best, and look forward to continuing to work with him as he moves to hold a position on our Advisory Board.

Read some of Aaron’s most recent publications below, free to access until 17th December 2020.

Direct loading of blood for plasma separation and diagnostic assays on a digital microfluidic device
Christopher Dixon, Julian Lamanna and Aaron R. Wheeler
Paper
Lab Chip, 2020, 20, 1845-1855

When robotics met fluidics
Junjie Zhong, Jason Riordon, Tony C. Wu, Harrison Edwards, Aaron R. Wheeler, Keith Pardee, Alán Aspuru-Guzik and David Sinton
Perspective
Lab Chip, 2020, 20, 709-716

Digital microfluidics and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for in situ diffusion measurements and reaction monitoring
Ian Swyer, Sebastian von der Ecken, Bing Wu, Amy Jenne, Ronald Soong, Franck Vincent, Daniel Schmidig, Thomas Frei, Falko Busse, Henry J. Stronks, André J. Simpson and Aaron R. Wheeler
Paper
Lab Chip, 2019, 19, 641-653

Towards a personalized approach to aromatase inhibitor therapy: a digital microfluidic platform for rapid analysis of estradiol in core-needle-biopsies
Sara Abdulwahab, Alphonsus H. C. Ng, M. Dean Chamberlain, Hend Ahmado, Lucy-Ann Behan, Hala Gomaa, Robert F. Casper and Aaron R. Wheeler
Paper
Lab Chip, 2017, 17, 1594-1602

Pre-concentration by liquid intake by paper (P-CLIP): a new technique for large volumes and digital microfluidics
Darius G. Rackus, Richard P. S. de Campos, Calvin Chan, Maria M. Karcz, Brendon Seale, Tanya Narahari, Christopher Dixon, M. Dean Chamberlain and Aaron R. Wheeler
Paper
Lab Chip, 2017, 17, 2272-2280

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Lab on a Chip continues partnership with online MicroTAS 2020: our prize winners blog!

The online µTAS 2020 meeting was held from 4-9th October, chaired by Séverine Le Gac and Hang Lu. Philippa Ross, Executive Editor of Lab on a Chip, contributed to a panel discussion on Ethics in Science, and Millie Newman, Deputy Editor of Lab on a Chip, attended to announce the winners of our prestigious Lab on a Chip-sponsored prizes. We’d like to thank all those who entered the awards this year, and to the judging panels who helped us select the winners. All three prizes received excellent submissions and we’re delighted to announce the winners below.


Lab on a Chip/Dolomite Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship
Professor Wilbur Lam (Georgia Institute of Technology/Emory University, USA), has been awarded the 15th Pioneers of Miniaturisation Lectureship, sponsored by Dolomite and Lab on a Chip. The Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship rewards early to mid-career scientists who have made extraordinary or outstanding contributions to the understanding or development of miniaturised systems.
Like previous years, Professor Lam will receive a monetary award, certificate and plaque, and gave a stunning talk during the online µTAS 2020 conference on clinical translations of microfluidic systems and lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.


 

Art in Science Competition
In collaboration with Greg Cooksey from the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), we were pleased to present the Art in Science award to Qinyu Li (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), for his image titled “A microvascular ring”. This award highlights the aesthetic value of scientific illustrations while still conveying scientific merit.
The image is a fluorescent photograph of a 3D vasculogenic network from human umbilical vein endothelial cells inside a ring-shaped polymethylmethacrylate microfluidic chamber.


Widmer Poster Prize
The Widmer Poster Prize was awarded this year to Janosch Hauser (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), for his poster and video presentation on “TEM grid preparation with minimal user interaction”. Janosch put a huge amount of time and effort into his presentation, and the judges were very impressed.


Congratulations to all the winners at this year’s online µTAS conference. We look forward to seeing you at µTAS 2021, hopefully in-person, in Palm Springs, California!

 

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Wearable and Implantable Sensors thematic collection published

Check out our new Lab on a Chip themed collection, focussing on Wearable and Implantable Sensors.

The collection was curated by members of the Lab on a Chip Editorial Board, and highlights some excellent recent papers in this area. The collection features papers addressing the issues involved in creating wearable or implantable sensors and their applications for diagnostics, medicine and therapeutics, health awareness and other novel applications.

We hope you enjoy reading these articles!*

 


Wearable sensors: modalities, challenges, and prospects
J. Heikenfeld, A. Jajack, J. Rogers, P. Gutruf, L. Tian, T. Pan, R. Li, M. Khine, J. Kim, J. Wang and J. Kim
Critical Review, Lab on a Chip Recent Review Articles, Lab on a Chip Recent Open Access Articles
Lab Chip, 2018, 18, 217-248

A fluorometric skin-interfaced microfluidic device and smartphone imaging module for in situ quantitative analysis of sweat chemistry
Yurina Sekine, Sung Bong Kim, Yi Zhang, Amay J. Bandodkar, Shuai Xu, Jungil Choi, Masahiro Irie, Tyler R. Ray, Punit Kohli, Naofumi Kozai, Tsuyoshi Sugita, Yixin Wu, KunHyuck Lee, Kyu-Tae Lee, Roozbeh Ghaffari and John A. Rogers
Paper
Lab Chip, 2018, 18, 2178-218


Electrostatically gated nanofluidic membrane for ultra-low power controlled drug delivery
Nicola Di Trani, Antonia Silvestri, Antons Sizovs, Yu Wang, Donald R. Erm, Danilo Demarchi, Xuewu Liua and Alessandro Grattoni
Paper
Lab Chip, 2020, 20, 1562-1576

Liquid metal electrode-enabled flexible microdroplet sensor
Renchang Zhang, Zi Ye, Meng Gao, Chang Gao, Xudong Zhang, Lei Li and Lin Gui
Paper
Lab Chip, 2020, 20, 496-504


A flexible enzyme-electrode sensor with cylindrical working electrode modified with a 3D nanostructure for implantable continuous glucose monitoring
Zhihua Pu, Jiaan Tu, Ruixue Han, Xingguo Zhang, Jianwei Wu, Chao Fang, Hao Wu, Xiaoli Zhang,  Haixia Yu and Dachao Li
Paper
Lab Chip, 2018, 18, 3570-3577

Flexible plastic, paper and textile lab-on-a chip platforms for electrochemical biosensing
Anastasios Economou, Christos Kokkinos and Mamas Prodromidis
Critical Review, Lab on a Chip Recent Review Articles
Lab Chip, 2018, 18, 1812-1830


A multi-modal sweat sensing patch for cross-verification of sweat rate, total ionic charge, and Na+ concentration
Zhen Yuan, Lei Hou, Mallika Bariya, Hnin Yin Yin Nyein, Li-Chia Tai, Wenbo Ji, Lu Li and Ali Javey
Paper
Lab Chip, 2019, 19, 3179-3189

A wearable electrofluidic actuation system
Haisong Lin, Hannaneh Hojaiji, Shuyu Lin, Christopher Yeung, Yichao Zhao, Bo Wang, Meghana Malige, Yibo Wang, Kimber King, Wenzhuo Yu, Jiawei Tan, Zhaoqing Wang, Xuanbing Cheng and  Sam Emaminejad
Communication
Lab Chip, 2019, 19, 2966-2972


Passive sweat collection and colorimetric analysis of biomarkers relevant to kidney disorders using a soft microfluidic system
Yi Zhang, Hexia Guo, Sung Bong Kim, Yixin Wu, Diana Ostojich, Sook Hyeon Park, Xueju Wang, Zhengyan Weng, Rui Li, Amay J. Bandodkar, Yurina Sekine, Jungil Choi, Shuai Xu, Susan Quaggin, Roozbeh Ghaffari and John A. Rogers
Paper
Lab Chip, 2019, 19, 1545-1555

Complete validation of a continuous and blood-correlated sweat biosensing device with integrated sweat stimulation
A. Hauke, P. Simmers, Y. R. Ojha, B. D. Cameron, R. Ballweg, T. Zhang, N. Twine, M. Brothers, E. Gomez and J. Heikenfeld
Paper
Lab Chip, 2018, 18, 3750-3759


*These articles are free to read for 4 weeks.

 

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Xingyu Jiang joins the Lab on a Chip Editorial Board

Xingyu Jiang

Lab on a Chip is pleased to announce that Professor Xingyu Jiang has recently joined our editorial board. Professor Jiang is a Chair Professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. He obtained his BS at the University of Chicago (1999) and PhD at Harvard University (Chemistry, 2004). In 2005, he joined the National Center for NanoScience and Technology/the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He moved to the Southern University of Science and Technology in 2018.

Professor Jiang’s research interests include microfluidics and nanomedicine and their applications in diagnostics, screening for therapeutics, as well as engineered tissues. He has over 300 publications in peer-reviewed journals. He was awarded the “Hundred Talents Plan” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation of China’s Distinguished Young Scholars Award, the Scopus Young Researcher Gold Award, and the Human Frontier Science Program Young Investigator Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK) and American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.

Welcome Xingyu!

 

 


Read some of Professor Jiang’s recent Lab on a Chip publications here*:

Hierarchically structured microchip for point-of-care immunoassays with dynamic detection ranges
Lei Mou, Ruihua Dong, Binfeng Hu, Zulan Li, Jiangjiang Zhang and Xingyu Jiang
Paper
Lab Chip, 2019, 19, 2750-2757

Profiling protein–protein interactions of single cancer cells with in situ lysis and co-immunoprecipitation
Ji Young Ryu, Jihye Kim, Min Ju Shon, Jiashu Sun, Xingyu Jiang, Wonhee Lee and Tae-Young Yoon
Communication
Lab Chip, 2019, 19, 1922-1928

Hand-powered centrifugal microfluidic platform inspired by the spinning top for sample-to-answer diagnostics of nucleic acids
Lu Zhang, Fei Tian, Chao Liu, Qiang Feng, Tingxuan Ma, Zishan Zhao, Tiejun Li, Xingyu Jiang and Jiashu Sun
Paper
Lab Chip, 2018, 18, 610-619


*These articles are free to read for 4 weeks.

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Lab on a Chip and Dolomite 2020 Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship Winner

Lab on a Chip and Dolomite are delighted to announce the winner of the 2020 Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship, Professor Wilbur A. Lam, MD, PhD.

This Lectureship honours and supports the up and coming, next generation of scientists who have significantly contributed to the understanding or development of miniaturised systems.

Professor Lam is a physician-scientist-engineer and clinical pediatric hematologist/oncologist. He is the W. Paul Bowers Research Chair of Pediatrics and Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech and an attending physician at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

His laboratory focuses on developing microsystems to study and diagnose hematologic diseases including sickle cell disease, thrombotic/bleeding disorders, and leukemia. He is also principal investigator of the Atlanta Center for Microsystems Engineered Point-of-Care Technology (ACME POCT), an integral part of the NIH’s Point-of-Care Technologies Research Network (POCTRN) and RADx COVID-19 initiative.

Professor Lam received his MD from Baylor College of Medicine, going on to earn his PhD in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkley. He completed his Fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology and Residency in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Our Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship Winner is invited to speak at MicroTAS, and thus Wilbur will be presenting his talk at the online MicroTAS 2020 meeting, 4-9th October 2020.

We our warmest congratulations to Wilbur on his achievement.


Read some of Wilbur Lam’s recent Lab on a Chip papers below:

Interdigitated microelectronic bandage augments hemostasis and clot formation at low applied voltage in vitro and in vivo
Elaissa T. Hardy, Yannan J. Wang, Sanathan Iyer, Robert G. Mannino, Yumiko Sakurai, Thomas H. Barker, Taiyun Chi, Yeojoon Youn, Hua Wang, Ashley C. Brown and Wilbur A. Lam
Lab Chip, 2018, 18, 2985-2993

Probing blood cell mechanics of hematologic processes at the single micron level
Jordan C. Ciciliano, Reza Abbaspour, Julia Woodall, Caroline Wu, Muhannad S. Bakir and Wilbur A. Lam
Lab Chip, 2017, 17, 3804-3816

3D microvascular model recapitulates the diffuse large B-cell lymphoma tumor microenvironment in vitro
Robert G. Mannino, Adriana N. Santiago-Miranda, Pallab Pradhan, Yongzhi Qiu, Joscelyn C. Mejias, Sattva S. Neelapu, Krishnendu Roy and Wilbur A. Lam
Lab Chip, 2017, 17, 407-414


*Free to read until 26th October 2020 with an RSC publishing account.

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Modelling arthritis

The function of tissues degrade during the course of human life, whether the cause is genetics, accidents, or wear and tear. Frequently experienced medical conditions associated with aging include blocked arteries, cataracts, and arthritis. The former two can be thoroughly treated via surgeries, but arthritis remains a bane to millions of sufferers because its treatment is rather palliative than intensive.

Let’s take the example of rheumatoid arthritis. It occurs when macrophage cells (a main component of the immune system) attack to the membrane (synovium) that surrounds the joints as a result of an auto-immune response. The damaged synovium thickens significantly, its anatomy undergoes striking changes such as metabolic activation of synoviocytes and continuous mass of cells invading into the cartilage and bone. If unchecked this inflammation can destroy the cartilage and the bone within the joint. What does this mean for the patients? A relatively short answer is painful knees, reduced physical activities, continuous uptake of anti-inflammatory medication, and painkillers. A cure does not yet loom on the horizon, but new tools to model rheumatoid arthritis could definitely make it easier to predict the onset of the disorder.

Peter Ertl and his colleagues at Vienna University of Technology, Austria, decided to tackle this problem in the article they recently published in Lab on a Chip. They researched the mechanisms governing the destructive inflammatory reaction in rheumatoid arthritis by designing a first-ever 3D synovium-on-chip tool, which can monitor the onset and progression of the tissue responses. The researchers were focused on monitoring the behavior of the inflated fibroblast-like synoviocytes, which makes the synovium membrane thicker. They used tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) to trigger synoviocytes to demonstrate inflammation response. The chips contained circular microchambers, where surface coatings are applied and Matrigel is filled for obtaining 3D organoids. Different hydrogel types were also examined to observe cell response. For the monitoring, the researchers used collimated laser beams, and the scattered light was collected using embedded organic photodiodes. This powerful optical measurement setup allowed for adjusting the detection range (50 nm to 10 µm) and sensitivity to any tissue construct (Figure 1). The researchers implemented a PDMS waveguide structure to the optical measurement setup to turn the light scattering measurements into reproducible ones. The measurement setup also enabled continuous monitoring of hydrogel polymerization, which was also controlled in this work since the polymerization time influences hydrogel stiffness, which in turn affects the fate of cell behavior. A typical measurement took four days, where the researchers obtained cultures accurately mimicking in-vivo rheumatoid arthritis conditions. A diseased phenotype becomes distinguishable within 2-3 days in the organ-on-chip platform, as this takes at least 14 days in conventional cell culture platforms. The developed tool can very well serve as a new modeling system for inflammatory arthritis and joint-related disease models.

 

Figure 1. Overview of the synovium-on-a-chip system with integrated time-resolved light scatter biosensing.

 

To download the full article for free* click the link below:

Monitoring tissue-level remodelling during inflammatory arthritis using a three-dimensional synovium-on-a-chip with non-invasive light scattering biosensing

Mario Rothbauer, Gregor Höll, Christoph Eilenberger, Sebastian R. A. Kratz, Bilal Farooq, Patrick Schuller, Isabel Olmos Calvo, Ruth A. Byrne, Brigitte Meyer, Birgit Niederreiter, Seta Küpcü, Florian Sevelda, Johannes Holinka, Oliver Hayden, Sandro F. Tedde, Hans P. Kiener and Peter Ertl, Lab Chip, 2020, Lab on a Chip Hot Articles

DOI: 10.1039/c9lc01097a


About the Webwriter

Burcu Gumuscu is an assistant professor in BioInterface Science Group at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. She strives for the development, fabrication, and application of smart biomaterials to realize high-precision processing in high-throughput microfluidic settings. She specifically focuses on the design and development of lab-on-a-chip devices containing hydrogels for diversified life sciences applications. She is also interested in combining data-mining and machine learning techniques with hypothesis-driven experimental research for future research.

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Emerging Investigator Series – Katherine Elvira

Lab on a Chip is delighted to introduce our most recent Emerging Investigator, Katherine Elvira!

Katherine received her undergraduate Master’s degree in Chemistry from Imperial College London in 2007. She started working in the field of microfluidics during her PhD (2012, Imperial College London), by building digital microfluidic platforms to perform automated chemical reactions. Katherine then moved to ETH Zürich (Switzerland) working firstly as a Postdoctoral Researcher and then as a Senior Scientist in the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering. Since 2017, Katherine is the Canada Research Chair in New Materials and Techniques for Health Applications and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Victoria, Canada. Katherine’s group currently develops microfluidic technologies to build bespoke artificial cells for the quantification of pharmacokinetic parameters in vitro. Katherine has recently presented this work at the Gordon Research Conference on Drug Metabolism (2019), is Co-Chair for the Gordon Research Conference on the Physics and Chemistry of Microfluidics (2023) and is a Scientific Mentor for the Creative Destruction Lab.

Read Dr Elvira’s Emerging Investigator paper* “A bespoke microfluidic pharmacokinetic compartment model for drug absorption using artificial cell membranes” and find out more about her and her research in the interview below.

Katherine Elvira

Image credit: UVic Photo Services

Your recent Emerging Investigator Series paper focuses on a new type of pharmacokinetic compartment model for the prediction of drug absorption. How has your research evolved from your first article to this most recent article?

Funnily enough, my first ever article was a very early precursor to this work. We built a microfluidic platform for the formation of droplet interface bilayers (DIBs) in high-throughput. I didn’t work with DIBs again until I started as a Canada Research Chair at the University of Victoria, but they are the basis for the new type of pharmacokinetic compartment model that we show in the Emerging Investigator article. We can now make them mimic human cell membranes and hence they form the building blocks for the compartments in the pharmacokinetic compartment model. In between, my research involved making microfluidic devices for application in many different fields, such as drug discovery, organic chemistry and food science. I also spent some time investigating why microfluidic droplets rarely behave perfectly, and how we can mitigate this. I like that paper because we included a poster in the ESI which my group still uses in the lab to determine what is going wrong with their chips.

What aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment?

I am really excited about some cool new artificial cell and tissue models that we are building, and how they can be used to model disease and drug behaviour in humans. My group is full of outstanding researchers, which makes it really easy to be excited about the work they are doing!

In your opinion, what is the biggest advantage of using your microfluidic platform over other methods?

It’s two things, really. Firstly, the fact that we are able to build networks of different compartments and artificial cell membranes on a chip. This allows us to build an in vitro model of the pathway that a drug would take in a human, from the intestine to the blood. And secondly, the fact that we can make these artificial cell membranes using phospholipids that are found in human cells. This makes our in vitro model quite biomimetic. In fact, we are able to predict molecular transport into cells three times better than the state-of-the-art in vitro commercial technique.

What do you find most challenging about your research?

Let’s face it, PDMS is awesome in some ways, but awful in others. I would love to find another material that has the advantages of PDMS, such as being cheap, transparent, and good for prototyping, but that has really stable and modifiable surface chemistry, and that we can mass produce for commercial applications.

In which upcoming conferences or events may our readers meet you?

I am part of the Technical Program Committee for MicroTAS 2020, so I will be at the online conference in October. And next year I am co-Vice Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on the Physics and Chemistry of Microfluidics, which will hopefully be taking place in Italy.

How do you spend your spare time?

I am really lucky to live in beautiful British Columbia on the West coast of Canada. During the winter months I get to go backcountry snowboarding in some of the most outstanding mountains in the world. In the summer, I switch my snowboard for a stand-up paddle board along the beaches in Victoria. I also love travelling, which I do a lot, both for work and for fun. I need my yoga classes to keep me relaxed, and have a slight obsession with cooking all the European foods that I miss from home.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

I wanted to be an astronaut when I was younger. It still sounds cool but I am also happy staying on earth and being an academic, it’s a pretty great life.

Can you share one piece of career-related advice or wisdom with other early career scientists?

I don’t always find it easy being a woman in science, so I would encourage early career female scientists to persevere, we need diversity in academia. I would tell their male colleagues to be good allies.

 

*Dr Elvira’s paper is free to access with an RSC account for the next month.

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