Hsueh-Chia Chang,
Bayer Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering,
University of Notre Dame, Interim Chief Technology Officer, Aopia Biosciences
H-C (Chia) Chang is a leader in electrokinetics, an important micro/nanofluidic technology for biochip platforms in future disease diagnostic products. His approach combines insightful theoretical analysis with simple but creative experiments to uncover new electrokinetic phenomena or to verify speculated ones. These new phenomena then led to inventions in new molecular diagnostics that use non-equilibrium electrokinetics and field-focusing physics to dramatically improve the performance of equilibrium probe-based assays without external fields. He and his PhD and postdoc students are inventors of 10 Notre Dame patents and 6 provisional patents, the largest IP output from any lab at Notre Dame. Five technologies have been licensed by startups near Notre Dame. One startup FCubed LLC will be going public this year. Another startup AgenDx has just licensed another of his technologies. Since 2000, 18 PhD and post-doc students of the Chang laboratory have embarked on academic careers as tenure-track professors at Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Food Science, Chemistry departments in 5 continents. Chia is the coauthor of a seminal book on Electrokinetics and he is the Founding Editor of Biomicrofluidics, the first American Institute of Physics journal in biology. He has published over 270 articles with 13,000 citations and an H-index of 63.
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PCR-Free MicroRNA Quantification Based on Ion-Selective Nanoporous Membranes and NanoporesMonday, 2 October 2017 at 17:15 We report an integrated biochip platform that can identify and quantify low copy numbers of microRNA biomarkers in a heterogeneous physiological sample like blood, saliva or urine. This quantification assay is done without PCR amplification, reporter labeling, extensive off-chip pretreatment and expensive optical sensors. Consequently, it does not introduce PCR/ligation bias and limits analyte loss during pretreatment. The main components of the integrated biochips are nanoporous membranes and solid-state nanopores with pore radii smaller than the nm-scale Debye length. We use the ion concentration and charge polarization features of the ion-selective membranes to control the on-chip ionic strength, actuate pH by splitting water, lyse exosomes and isolate/concentrate the target molecules. The final nanopore sensor or sensor array utilizes surface modification and pore geometry to preferentially delay the translocation time of the target microRNAs to achieve single-molecule identification and quantification. The integrated chip achieves a translocation frequency (throughput) that is at least one hundred times higher than any literature or commercial nanopore technology.
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