The BE Seminar Series continues this week. We hope to see you there!
Speaker: Shuichi Takayama, Ph.D.
Professor, GRA Eminent Scholar, Price Gilbert, Jr. Chair in Regenerative Engineering and Medicine
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University
Date: Thursday, March 14th, 2019
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Room 337, Towne Building
“Microfluidics and Immuno-Materials for Organs-on-a-Chip”
This presentation will describe microfluidic technologies to conveniently produce life-like pulsatile flows along with applications to study of lung injury, enhancement of in vitro fertilization, and analysis of frequency-dependent cellular responses. The microfluidic technologies range from adaptation of piezo-electric actuator arrays from Braille displays to design of microfluidic circuits that can be designed to switch fluid flow on and off periodically on their own. The presentation will also describe engineered materials to mimic an aspect of the innate immune system to combat bacterial infection. More specifically, reconstituted chromatin microwebs inspired by neutrophil extracellular traps. Using a defined composition reconstituted chromatin microweb, we reveal impact of microweb DNA-histone ratio on bacteria capture. Additionally, we found that E. coli, including clinical isolates and resistant strains, are killed more efficiently by the last-resort antibiotic, colistin, when bound to microwebs. Recent efforts towards incorporation of these materials into human cell systems will also be described. Time permitting, topics on organoids, fibrosis, liquid-liquid phase separation, and scaling may be incorporated.