Thomas Laurell is Professor in Medical and Chemical Microsensors at Lund University. Laurell has a background in engineering with a focus on biomedical technology, with a PhD from the technical faculty at Lund University. Laurell has 20 years experience in the development of lab-on-a-chip based bioanalytical and medical diagnostic technology. He was appointed distinguished professor at dept. Biomedical Engineering at Dongguk University, Seoul, Korea in 2009.
Laurell is a member of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, of Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and Royal Physiographic Society. He has received several prestigious awards such as the The AkzoNobel Science Award in 2009 for his ground breaking interdisciplinary research, Wallmark Award by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his microsensorsystem innovations in 2006, SKAPA Award in memory of Alfred Nobel – for the best innovation of the year in Sweden 1996 and 2003, and Erna Ebelings Price for outstanding research in microfluidics and biomedical engineering in 2006. He is founder of four start-up companies. Laurell is also the President of the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society (www.cbmsociety.org).
Modeling the Embryonic Neural Tube in a Chip
Wednesday, 19 June 2019 at 14:00
Add to Calendar ▼2019-06-18 10:00:002019-06-18 11:00:00Europe/LondonNew Opportunities in Acoustofluidic Processing of Liquid BiopsiesOrgan-on-a-Chip and Tissue-on-a-Chip Europe 2019 in Rotterdam, The NetherlandsRotterdam, The NetherlandsSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com
Studying the biology of the early embryonic development stages of the human brain poses severe challenges in terms of access to fetal brain tissue. Current strategies are either referred to studies on animal models or so called neurospheres organoids. Although more widely available, current animal models do not fully reflect the human biology, neither in terms of brain size nor in anatomy. Neural organoids (spheroids), on the other hand, can be generated in large quantities but with the draw back that the organization of the brain regions occurs randomly, in contrast to the spatially well-structured organization along the rostro caudal axis of the fetal brain, in the fore brain, midbrain and hind brain regions. To overcome these bottlenecks, we have developed an organ-on-a-chip (OOC) system that reproducibly generates a neural tissue from human embryonic stem cells with a rostro caudal organization modelling the human embryonic brain. A core of this organ-on-chip system is a gradient generator that produces a morphogen (gsk3i) gradient across the cell culture during the initial neural stem cell patterning phase. The obtained rostro caudal organization has been verified by RNA expression profiling of region specific genes and this OOC platform now provides a robust and reproducible platform to model the human fetal brain. The OOC-system design and performance will be presented and the outlook towards new opportunities to accomplish temporally resolved monitoring of cellular signaling in the course of brain development will be discussed.
New Opportunities in Acoustofluidic Processing of Liquid Biopsies
Tuesday, 18 June 2019 at 10:00
Add to Calendar ▼2019-06-18 10:00:002019-06-18 11:00:00Europe/LondonNew Opportunities in Acoustofluidic Processing of Liquid BiopsiesOrgan-on-a-Chip and Tissue-on-a-Chip Europe 2019 in Rotterdam, The NetherlandsRotterdam, The NetherlandsSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com
Blood sampling and molecular analysis of plasma is the most common clinical diagnostic modality in modern health care. With more advanced means to downstream processing, sub components of blood can be isolated, improving the diagnostic outcome. Detection and analysis of rare events is specifically an area where high performance isolation of sub components of blood is critical and where lab-on-a-chip technology has paved the way for several new approaches. Acoustic forces in combination with microfluidics has open new avenues for high performance blood cell separation, enabling isolation of cancer cells from blood, leukocyte sub populations and more recently also enrichment and purification of extracellular vesicles. Our initial efforts in isolating circulating tumor cells using acoustophoresis in clinical scale prostate cancer patients samples will be reported.
Although conventional acoustophoresis is limited in is ability to manipulate particles smaller than 1 um secondary acoustic effects can alleviate this short coming. Scattered ultrasound between larger particles, that can be retained in a local acoustic field in a microchannel, can be utilized to enrich submicron vesicles on the larger “trapping particles”. Based on this we have developed a microfluidic platform that enables isolation of extra cellular vesicles (EVs) from biofluids such a urine, blood plasma and cell culture medium without the need for ultracentrifugation. Further, benefits of isolating EVs by means of acoustic trapping is rapid processing that provides relatively high recoveries (up to 60-80%), yet handling small sample volumes (20-50 uL blood plasma), giving access to molecular profiling of extra cellular vesicles in biobanks. Our studies have demonstrated protein and miRNA profiling of blood plasma EVs from myocardial infarction patients as well as in urine samples from healthy donors. More recently we have been able to detect EV protein biomarker profiles in heart transplant patients with acute rejection which could not be detected in blood plasma.
Add to Calendar ▼2019-06-18 00:00:002019-06-19 00:00:00Europe/LondonOrgan-on-a-Chip and Tissue-on-a-Chip Europe 2019Organ-on-a-Chip and Tissue-on-a-Chip Europe 2019 in Rotterdam, The NetherlandsRotterdam, The NetherlandsSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com
Add to Calendar ▼2019-06-18 10:00:002019-06-18 11:00:00Europe/LondonNew Opportunities in Acoustofluidic Processing of Liquid BiopsiesOrgan-on-a-Chip and Tissue-on-a-Chip Europe 2019 in Rotterdam, The NetherlandsRotterdam, The NetherlandsSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com
