IMG faculty member, Dr. Z. Hugh Fan, saw his group make a big showing at the MicroTAS 2019 Conference in Basel, Switzerland! His students Pablo Dopico, Carlos Manzanas, and Karim Yousry are presenting their work there this week. Nice job!
Check out the conference here: https://www.microtas2019.org/
Dr. Fan’s group will have an open house this Friday 10/18 (tomorrow) at 11:00 AM in the Microfluidics lab (Benton 237E). For those who have join IMG recently, the open house is an invitation to everyone in IMG to learn about the research, the projects, and the equipment of an IMG group. Some demos will be set up in the lab, and we will be showing some of our projects:
- Pablo, Minh-Chau & Zac: Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs): explanation on how to run a device for CTCs capture, and visualization of the cells under the microscope.
Longtime IMG member, Kartik Sondhi, is celebrating his recent paper titled “Characterization of Bending, Crease, Aging, and Immersion Effects on Flexible Screen-Printed Silver Traces” published in IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology! He has also been accepted to the IDTechEx Show in Santa Clara this coming November! Congratulations!
His paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8851266
Jose Varillas will defend his dissertation, entitled: "Evaluation of Pre-Enrichment Methods and Enumeration of Circulating Tumor Cells for Pancreatic Cancer Treatment Monitoring " on Monday, 3/25, at 3:00 PM in HPNP G-112. Snacks and refreshments will be provided.
This week, the speakers for the IMG Seminar are:
Cells as Microsystems. Successful integration of MEMS with biomedicine requires an intimate understanding of biophysiological processes. Dr. Simmons will describe tools at the micro and mesoscale she uses to study these processes, including cells themselves! Specific applications in cancer and regeneration will be highlighted.
Capillary Force Driven Single-Cell Spiking Apparatus for Studying Circulating Tumor Cell. The characterization of single cells within heterogeneous populations has great impact on both biomedical sciences and cancer research. By investigating cellular compositions on a broad scale, pertinent outliers may be lost in the sample set. Alternatively, an investigation focused on the behavior of specific cells, such as circulating tumor cells (CTCs), will reveal genetic biomarkers or phenotypic characteristics associated with cancer and metastasis. On average, CTC concentration in peripheral blood is extremely low, as few as one to two per billion of healthy blood cells. Consequently, the critical element lacking in many methods of CTC detection is accurate cell capture efficiency at low concentrations. To simulate CTC isolation, researchers usually spike small amounts of tumor cells to healthy blood for separation. However, spiking tumor cells at extremely low concentrations is challenging in a standard laboratory setting. We report our study on an innovative apparatus and method designed for low-cost, precise, and replicable single-cell spiking (SCS).
Kartik Sondhi will defend his proposal, entitled: "Materials and Methods for Fabricating Multilayer Flexible Electronic Circuits" on Friday, 10/5, at 1:00 PM in LAR 234.
Refreshments and snacks will be provided!
Kangfu Chen will defend his dissertation, entitled: "Flow and Interaction Patterns Between Tumor Cells and Microfabricated Structures" on Monday, 9/17, at 10:00 AM in Nanoscale Research Facility 115. Refreshments will be provided.
This week, the speakers for the IMG Seminar are:
A filter array regulated microflow (FARM) chip for circulating tumor cell isolation . Circulating tumor cells (CTC) are cancer cells in the circulating system shredded from the primary tumor. CTCs have been considered as important biomarkers for early detection of metastasis, therapy monitoring and disease prognosis. However, the rarity of CTCs in the blood (tens of CTCs per mL blood) remains a technological barricade. We developed a Filter Array Regulated Microflow (FARM) chip combing filtration and immunoaffinity based CTC capture. The FARM chip is able to isolate CTCs with low deformability or high antibody expression level. Even more deformable CTCs with lower antibody expression are likely to be captured if the two components combination exceeds the CTC capture threshold. Overall, this method is capable of isolating, detecting and enumerating CTCs with high throughput and superb efficiency.
Congratulations to all of this year's IMG Award recipients, and a special thanks to all those who have contributed to our group. This year's kick-off meeting focused on the future of our group, and making it evident that "our most valuable asset is you". Let us continue working as a team and setting a precedent for research groups all around.
The IMG Awards recognize outstanding achievements and contributions of student members in our organization. The research award honors the exceptional academic impact the students have made in their field, and the service award acknowledges the hard work the students have put into improving and maintaining the quality of IMG.
The IMG faculty are pleased to release the IMG annual report for the calendar year 2017. This document is a record of the group activities, achievements and finances for the previous year. You are encouraged to refer to this document if needed.
The 2017 IMG Annual Report can be downloaded here.