(6b) Microfluidic Biosensors to Monitor Health

Many deaths in the U.S. are attributed to chronic diseases.  Diabetes, heart disease, and stroke are all examples of preventable and/or manageable chronic diseases that affect many people under the age of 60.  This means that on a yearly basis large amounts of money are spent on health care for treatment.  Along with this expense comes compromised quality of life (in some cases disability), and escalating health care costs.  Healthcare cost can be alleviated if there is technology available that allows early disease detection, so that diet and exercise can be implemented as a treatment option.  Microfluidics and dielectrophoresis (DEP) are technologies applicable to disease detection.  Specifically microfluidics manipulates small volumes of fluid (μL)  and DEP uses electric fields to detect differences and separate biological cells.  Together DEP and microfluidic devices are useful for characterizing biological cell properties and distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy cells.  Microfluidic devices are fabricated at a low cost making them suitable in healthcare.

The theme of my research will be improved healthcare using microfluidic biosensors with a focus on (1) health and (2) exercise assessments.  I would like to use my knowledge in DEP to achieve these assessments in microdevices.  Health care assessments such as blood screens completed in microfluidic biosensors can give indication of disease on a shorter time scale.  Wearable microfluidic biosensors that monitor a person’s health during exercise are also important in healthcare especially for person’s overweight.  I have experience using DEP technology to study red blood cells, polystyrene beads, and human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs).  The focus of my doctoral work was on the quantification of hMSCs dielectric properties (membrane permittivity and capacitance) for the design of a continuous cell sorting microfluidic device.  I’ve also worked on the development of a new DEP experimental technique that rapidly determines the DEP response spectra of biological particles via frequency sweep rates.  This work was optimized using polystyrene beads and extended to red blood cells. My plan is to continue research on DEP and biological cells with expansion into the area of exercise science to help improve healthcare.