G. Durmus
Stanford University,
United States
Keywords: Magnetic Levitation, nanomedicine
Summary:
At the convergence of engineering, biology and nanomedicine, our research is centered on enabling solutions to real world problems at the clinical level, where traditional approaches fail. In this talk, I will present an overview of our work in the areas focused on applications of magnetic levitation and microfluidic methods for biomarker-free sorting of rare cells and rare signatures from whole blood and assembling cells in zero-gravity. Cells consist of nano- and micro-scale components that contribute to their fundamental magnetic and density signatures. Taking advantage of the unusual physics of cells in the magnetic levitation platform, we demonstrated that both eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells can be levitated and that each cell has a unique levitation profile. In addition, our levitation platform uniquely enables ultra-sensitive density measurements, imaging, profiling, and sorting of millions of cells (i.e., circulating tumor cells, cardiomyocytes, sickle cells, adipocytes) in seconds in real-time with single-cell resolution. This technology platform is broadly applicable for label-free cell sorting, diagnostics as well as drug screening in personalized medicine, tissue engineering, and bio-space research.