SELECTBIO - Lab-on-a-Chip & Microfluidics World Congress 2023 Biographies

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Building Bespoke Artificial Cells and Tissues For Drug Discovery

Thursday, 30 November 2023 at 12:00

Add to Calendar ▼2023-11-30 12:00:002023-11-30 13:00:00Europe/LondonBuilding Bespoke Artificial Cells and Tissues For Drug DiscoveryLab-on-a-Chip and Microfluidics World Congress 2023 in Laguna Hills, CaliforniaLaguna Hills, CaliforniaSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com

Cells are complex and it is not always possible to know what effect each component of the cell has on drug transport. The goal of my research is to use microfluidic technologies to build bespoke artificial cells and tissues from the bottom up, starting with the cell membrane and then adding other cellular components such as transporter proteins and the cell microenvironment. This allows us to quantify how each component of a cell affects the uptake of drugs. We use these artificial cells to mimic how an orally administered drug moves from the intestine into an intestinal cell, and then from the cell into the blood stream, to mimic how the cell membrane changes during cancer and to build artificial tissues such as the blood brain barrier on a chip. We want our new in vitro models to help us predict the in vivo drug behaviour.

Katherine Elvira, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair, Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar, University of Victoria

Katherine is the Canada Research Chair in Microfluidics for Drug Discovery and Health Care, a Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar in partnership with the CLEAR Foundation, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Victoria, Canada. Katherine received her undergraduate integrated Bachelor's and Master’s degree in Chemistry from Imperial College London in 2007. She started working in the field of microfluidics during her PhD (2012, Imperial College London). She then moved to ETH Zürich working firstly as a Postdoctoral Researcher and then as a Senior Scientist in the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering. She moved to the University of Victoria in 2017.