Poster Presentations
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Microfluidic chip for bacterial biofilm formation and analysis
Pouya MEHRDEL, research engineer, BIOASTER
Bacterial biofilms cause 80% of all human chronic infections and are extremely resistant to antibiotics. Chronic infections affect everyone – the young and old, the rich and poor, men, women and children – and represent a tremendous burden on patients, families and societies. Biofilms urgently call for potent antimicrobial agents and novel antibiofilm strategies. Traditional static biofilm models (i.e. transwell systems) are limited in their ability to reproduce typical morphological characteristics of in vivo biofilms. There is a dire need for advanced and easy-to-use in vitro systems for testing the antibiotic susceptibility of bacterial biofilms. We recently developed multiple dynamic cultivation protocols on chip to form biofilms and investigate the effect of models and novel therapeutic strategies. In this study, we present a platform that enables the chance of biofilm formation under static and dynamic conditions. Under dynamic conditions, besides constantly providing the biofilm with nutrients and removing the residues, we can apply a controlled shear stress on the biofilm, which is known to have a key effect on the biofilm properties [1]. The different behavior in formed Biofilms between static and dynamic cultivation protocols was characterized and deeper analyzed.
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