Bio-Microfluidics: From Simple Microfluidic Systems to Channel-Less Movable Microfluidics
Mohammed Qasaimeh,
Assistant Professor,
New York University Abu Dhabi
Microfluidics has emerged as a technology with significant impact on cell biology and medical research. The ability to manipulate fluids at the microscale has led to new methods to manipulate and study biological samples at the single cell level. During this talk, I will present microfluidic systems for three different biomedical applications: (i) I will discuss our work on developing a simple microfluidic system for culturing mammalian cells and temporally-controlling the delivery of bio-reagents. We used the system to spatiotemporally control the distribution of Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF) within the cell-culture channel, and cancer cells were exposed to TNF pulses as short as 8 s. With this system, we measured for the first time the shortest required duration of TNF stimulation that elicits activation of the survival pathway (NF-kB) in cancer cells. Preliminary results suggested that short pulses of TNF stimulation can provoke early cancer cell apoptosis. Next, (ii) I will introduce our work with Microfluidic Quadrupoles (MQs), which constitutes the first experimental demonstration and characterization of fluidic quadrupoles. We used the MQ to manipulate concentration gradients of chemicals and established the concept of floating gradients. We used the MQ to apply floating gradients of Interleukin-8 to cultured human neutrophils in a Petri dish, and challenged neutrophils with stationary and moving gradients. The setup allowed us to observe dynamics of neutrophils during adhesion, polarization, and migration. Finally, (iii) I will discuss our recent experiments in using the herringbone microfluidic chip to capture circulating plasma cells from blood samples taken from multiple myeloma patients.
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