Fisher Team Update Nov ’14

Hi All, just a quick post to up date you on what we are up to.

3 Things going on in the lab:

Ryan continues to make his nano particles using chips, he is loading them with an anti-inflammatory agent (parthenolide) and testing them on macrophages in vitro. Hopefully more on that soon.

Niecy just presented last week her work with PDMS cell chambers at the Rochester Academy of Sciences Fall symposium. This is with an eye on later integrating the chambers to more complex chips (for bio-sensing applications). We simply grew macros in chambers of different sizes and measured cell death over time without changing the media. The cells were doing pretty well in 50ul chambers (pretty big still) after 48 hours, I figured this would not surprise some of you. We are working on making them smaller.

Me, I have been playing with lamination, with the objective of making flat, flexible chips. Would love to hear what you guys think of this, I have not found much out there on this topic, perhaps I am no looking in the right places.

That’s it, hope everyone is doing great. We are hosting Greg and Henry in two weeks, the nano biology students are looking forward to hearing from them.

Some specs:

The cell chambers are made out of regular PDMS and microscope slides. Some are pretty big, up to 500ul in volume, then we have 200ul and 50ul versions. We see little to no evaporation in 48 hours and no more than 10-15% death in the 50ul ones.
The flat microfluidics are cut with the silhouette, the small ones measure about 8 x 8 mm, with a thickness of about 0.2 mm. The channel’s widths vary, hard to measure them, but I think they go from 0.3-0.6 mm. That would give us an average channel dimension of about 200 x 400 microns (h x w). The material is simply laminating pouches, polyester I think. No PDMS or glass involved, except for the inputs/outputs, which are still a bit unreliable and the major hurdle when working with this things.