Lab on a Chip Blog

We are delighted to welcome Professors Keisuke Goda, Sindy Tang & Yi-Chin Toh to the Lab on a Chip Advisory Board.

Keisuke Goda

Professor, Department of Chemistry

University of Tokyo, Japan

Keisuke Goda is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tokyo, an adjunct professor in the Institute of Technological Sciences at Wuhan University, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Bioengineering at UCLA. He obtained his B.A. from UC Berkeley summa cum laude in 2001 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 2007, both in physics. At MIT, he worked on the development of gravitational-wave detectors in the LIGO group which led to the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. After several years of work on high-speed imaging and microfluidics at Caltech and UCLA, he joined the University of Tokyo as a professor. His research group focuses on the development of serendipity-enabling technologies based on molecular imaging and spectroscopy together with microfluidics and computational analytics to push the frontier of science. He currently leads Serendipity Lab, a global network of scientists who aim to realize Louis Pasteur’s statement “Chance favours the prepared mind”. He has published >300 papers, filed >30 patents, and received numerous awards and honours such as Japan Academy Medal and JSPS Prize. He is a fellow of RSC and SPIE.

Keisuke was the recipient of the Lab on a Chip & Dolomite Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship Award 2021, and is a Thought Leader for our on-going AI in Microfluidics thematic collection.

Find out more on the GODA LAB website and follow @ut_godalab on Twitter

Here are a selection of Keisuke’s Lab on a Chip papers below:

• Deep imaging flow cytometry
• Are droplets really suitable for single-cell analysis? A case study on yeast in droplets
• AI on a chip

Sindy Tang

Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and by courtesy of Radiology (Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics)

Stanford University, USA

Sindy KY Tang is the Kenneth and Barbara Oshman Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and by courtesy of Radiology (Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics) at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in Engineering Sciences under the supervision of Prof. George Whitesides. Her lab at Stanford works on the fundamental understanding of fluid mechanics and mass transport in micro-nano systems, and the application of this knowledge towards problems in biology, rapid diagnostics for health and environmental sustainability. The current areas of focus include the flow physics of confined micro-droplets using experimental and machine learning methods, interfacial mass transport and self-assembly, and ultrahigh throughput opto-microfluidic systems for disease diagnostics, water and energy sustainability, and single-cell wound healing studies. She was a Stanford Biodesign Faculty Fellow in 2018. Dr. Tang’s work has been recognized by multiple awards including the NSF CAREER Award, 3M Nontenured Faculty Award, the ACS Petroleum Fund New Investigator Award, and invited lecture at the Nobel Symposium on Microfluidics in Sweden.

Sindy has been a committed member of the Lab on a Chip 2022 Commissioning Panel

Find out more on the Tang Lab website and follow @TangSindy on Twitter

Here are a selection of Sindy’s Lab on a Chip papers below:

• Exponential magnetophoretic gradient for the direct isolation of basophils from whole blood in a microfluidic system
• Confinement and viscosity ratio effect on droplet break-up in a concentrated emulsion flowing through a narrow constriction
• Optofluidic ultrahigh-throughput detection of fluorescent drops

Yi-Chin Toh

Associate Professor, School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering,  

Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Yi-Chin Toh is a Future Fellow and Associate Professor at the Queensland University of Technology. She obtained her B.Eng in Chemical Engineering and Ph.D in Bioengineering from the National University of Singapore in 2001 and 2008 respectively. She did her post-doctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008 under Professor Joel Voldman’s guidance. Before joining QUT, she led an independent research group as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore.

Her research interest is in engineering multi-scale tissue models to mimic complex biological interactions during human development and diseases, as well as translating them into scalable platforms for disease modeling and drug testing applications. Dr Toh is a recipient of the Australia Research Council Future Fellowship, National University of Singapore Research Scholarship, A*STAR Graduate Scholarship and A*STAR International Fellowship.

Yi-Chin has been a committed member of the Lab on a Chip 2022 Commissioning Panel

Find out more on the MicroTE Lab website and follow @MicroTElab on Twitter

Here are a selection of Yi-Chin’s Lab on a Chip papers below:

• Integration of a microfluidic multicellular coculture array with machine learning analysis to predict adverse cutaneous drug reactions
• Self-aligning Tetris-Like (TILE) modular microfluidic platform for mimicking multi-organ interactions
• A liver-immune coculture array for predicting systemic drug-induced skin sensitization

Please join us in welcoming our new Advisory Board members and we look forward to continuing to work with them on Lab on a Chip!

Lab on a Chip is delighted to be sponsoring the EMBL Microfluidics Conference (11-13 July), bringing together top researchers and emerging research leaders to spark scientific exchange and create community. Topics spanning from fundamental physics & chemistry to device design and nascent biological applications will be presented, which should be of interest to everyone from experts in microfluidic design to users of the next-generation of microfluidic tools, and from academic scholars and trainees to industry colleagues.

Session Topics

• Probing biology
• Next-generation device design and emerging applications
• Disease diagnostics, analytical chemistry and chemical synthesis
• Single-cell and single-molecule analyses

Featured amongst the speaker list is Associate Editor Yoon-Kyoung Cho, & Commissioning Panel member Yi-Chin Toh!

Find out more about the conference:

Date: 11 – 13 Jul 2022

Location: EMBL Heidelberg and Virtual

Deadline(s):

Abstract submission: 19 Apr 2022

Registration (On-site): 9 May 2022

Registration (Virtual): 4 Jul 2022

The hybrid µTAS 2021 meeting was held from 10-14th October, chaired by Amy Herr & Joel Voldman. 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 Keisuke Goda (University of Tokyo, Japan), has been awarded the 16th Pioneers of Miniaturization 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 Goda will receive a monetary award, certificate and plaque, and gave a stunning talk during the µTAS 2021 conference: “a love story of imaging and microfluidics”.

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:

“Living Impression Sunrise” by Yang Du (Fudan University, China)

An fluorescent image of tumor pre-metastatic perivascular niche. 3D microvessels networks formed by self-assembly of Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells interacted with tumor organoids in this microfluidic chip. The title of this image is inspired by Claude Monet’s Impression Sunrise.

Widmer Poster Prize
The Widmer Poster Prize was awarded this year to Sohyung Lee (UCLA, USA), for her poster and video presentation on “Scalable fabrication of 3D structured microparticles using induced phase separation”. Sohyung put a huge amount of time and effort into her presentation, and the judges were very impressed.

Congratulations to all the winners at this year’s hybrid µTAS conference. We look forward to seeing you at µTAS 2022 (Hangzhou, China)!

Read the growing collection here – rsc.li/AIinMicrofluidics

We are delighted to announce a new thematic collection in Lab on a Chip on AI in Microfluidics, with Professors Keisuke Goda, Hang Lu, Peng Fei & Jochen Guck as Thought Leaders.

The last decade has seen unprecedented growth in computational power and cloud storage breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). AI-produced outcomes have been proven comparable or even superior to the performance of human experts in drug design, material discovery, and medical diagnosis. In these applications, lab on a chip technology, in particular microfluidics, plays an important role as a platform for both the construction and implementation of AI in a large-scale, high-throughput, automated, multiplexed, and cost-effective manner. The goal of this thematic collection is to highlight new advances in this growing field with an emphasis on the interface between technological advancements and impactful applications.

This on-going collection is collated by Thought Leaders Keisuke Goda, Hang Lu, Peng Fei & Jochen Guck, and the Lab on a Chip Editorial Office. Are you interested in submitting? We welcome submissions of original research articles and reviews, which (after peer review) will be published and added to the online collection. Papers in this collection will receive extensive promotion throughout the submission period and also will be disseminated widely as a ‘flagship’ collection for the journal. If you are interested in submitting to the series, please get in touch with the Lab on a Chip Editorial Office at loc-rsc@rsc.org

This collection is open for submissions now

Lab on a Chip and Dolomite are delighted to announce the winner of the 2021 Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship, Professor Keisuke Goda.

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.

Keisuke Goda is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tokyo, an adjunct professor in the Institute of Technological Sciences at Wuhan University, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Bioengineering at UCLA. He obtained his B.A. from UC Berkeley summa cum laude in 2001 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 2007, both in physics. At MIT, he worked on the development of gravitational-wave detectors in the LIGO group which led to the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. After several years of work on high-speed imaging and microfluidics at Caltech and UCLA, he joined the University of Tokyo as a professor. His research group focuses on the development of serendipity-enabling technologies based on molecular imaging and spectroscopy together with microfluidics and computational analytics to push the frontier of science. He currently leads Serendipity Lab, a global network of scientists who aim to realize Louis Pasteur’s statement “Chance favours the prepared mind”. He has published >300 papers, filed >30 patents, and received numerous awards and honours such as Japan Academy Medal and JSPS Prize. He is a fellow of RSC and SPIE.

Our Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship Winner is invited to speak at MicroTAS, and thus Keisuke will be presenting his talk at the MicroTAS 2021 meeting, 10-14^th October 2021.

We give our warmest congratulations to Keisuke on his achievement!

Read some of Keisuke Goda’s recent Lab on a Chip papers* below:

Are droplets really suitable for single-cell analysis? A case study on yeast in droplets

Y. Nakagawa, S. Ohnuki, N. Kondo, K. Itto, F. Ghanegolmohammadi, A. Isozaki, Y. Ohya, and K. Goda, “Are droplets really suitable for single-cell analysis? A case study on yeast in droplets”, Lab on a Chip, 19, 3793, (2021)

AI on a chip

A. Isozaki, J. Harmon, Y. Zhou, S. Li, Y. Nakagawa, M. Hayashi, H. Mikami, C. Lei, and K. Goda, “AI on a chip”, Lab on a Chip, 17, 3074 (2020)

Intelligent image-activated cell sorting 2.0

A. Isozaki, H. Mikami, H. Tezuka, H. Matsumura, K. Huang, M. Akamine, K. Hiramatsu, T. Iino, T. Ito, H. Karakawa, Y. Kasai, Y. Li, Y. Nakagawa, S. Ohnuki, T. Ota, Y. Qian, S. Sakuma, T. Sekiya, Y. Shirasaki, N. Suzuki, E. Tayyabi, T. Wakamiya, M. Xu, M. Yamagishi, H. Yan, Q. Yu, S. Yan, D. Yuan, W. Zhang, Y. Zhao, F. Arai, R. E. Campbell, C. Danelon, D. Di Carlo, K. Hiraki, Y. Hoshino, Y. Hosokawa, M. Inaba, A. Nakagawa, Y. Ohya, M. Oikawa, S. Uemura, Y. Ozeki, T. Sugimura, N. Nitta, and K. Goda, “Intelligent image-activated cell sorting 2.0”, Lab on a Chip, 13, 2263 (2020)

*Free to read until 31st October 2021 with an RSC publishing account.

We are delighted to announce a new thematic collection in Lab on a Chip, focusing on miniaturized sensors and diagnostics, with Professors Yoon-Kyoung Cho and Xingyu Jiang as Thought Leaders.

Our journal is the home for cutting-edge reports about innovations in the “lab on a chip,” which by nature involves developments in microfluidics, sensors, optics, electronics, imaging, materials, mechanical components, and more. In this thematic collection, we focus on the critical importance of the sensor to the lab on a chip, whether the sensor relies on optical, chemical, electrical, or mechanical forces (or many others). This collection also focuses on how lab on a chip/sensor systems are being used to form the next-generation of miniaturized diagnostics, whether they are implantable, wearable, portable, or simply used in the lab.

This on-going collection is collated by Thought Leaders (and Lab on a Chip Editorial Board members) Yoon-Kyoung Cho, Xingyu Jiang and the Lab on a Chip Editorial Office. Are you interested in submitting? We welcome submissions of original research articles and reviews, which (after peer review) will be published and added to the online collection. Papers in this collection will receive extensive promotion throughout the submission period and also will be disseminated widely as a ‘flagship’ collection for the journal. If you are interested in submitting to the series, please get in touch with the Lab on a Chip Editorial Office at loc-rsc@rsc.org

This collection open for submissions now, with a deadline of February 1^st 2022

Leonie Bastin¹ and Karen Alim^1,2

¹ Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany

² Physics Department, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Why is this useful?

In microfluidic devices with small structures, air bubbles are often trapped at interfaces, corners or structures within the channel. The presented method is reproducible, fast, and only requires an additional ultrasonic bath. Vibrations from the ultrasonic bath detach the bubbles from surfaces. By flushing the chip with water at the same time, the bubbles are transported out.

What do I need?

• An ultrasonic bath
• The microfluidic device
• A syringe filled with water

What do I do?

1. Connect the syringe to the microfluidic device.
2. Lay the device into the ultrasonic bath and turn it on.
3. Manually fill the device with water, varying the pressure in pulses of around a second in length (see inset in Figure 1A). Use high flow rates! In our case, we used flow rates of approximately 50 microliters per second during the pulses.
4. Before the syringe is empty, turn off the ultrasound bath, take the device out and check whether there is any air left in the channel.
5. If there is air left in the chip, press some water through with high speed when the device is not laying in the ultrasound bath.
6. If there are still bubbles left, repeat the procedure.
7. Once no bubbles are left in the chip, insert the syringe for your experiment on the other side of the chip. To avoid the appearance of new bubbles, press out some of the liquid so that a drop appears at the outlet before you insert the syringe.

Figure 1: (A) Schematic drawing of the setup. The tubing at the outlet is optional if you fill the chip with water. The manual pressure pulses are sketched in the inset. (B) Photo of the setup without tubing at the outlet. (C) Fluorescence microscopy image of a chip filled with fluorescein to visualise the structure that is shown in D and E only filled with water. The center part is filled with 100 micrometer wide PDMS-pillars, which are arranged in a hexagonal structure. (D) Photo of a small region of the chip when filled with water without using the ultrasound method. Many air bubbles are visible between the pillar structures (arrows). (E) Photo of the same region after using the ultrasound method. No air bubbles are left in the chip.

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 17^th 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

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.