Microfluidics and biosensors to manipulate and interrogate living cells for clinical applications

Technologies arising from the continuing miniaturisation of engineering devices have reached sub-cellular scales. This opens up the potential of creating systems that can act on and interrogate cell populations and single cells, using technologies from micromachining and microelectronics. Controlling, measuring and understanding cellular interactions, population dynamics and single cells promises significant impact into clinical applications such as diagnostics, therapy monitoring and therapeutics.
This talk will present the development of microfluidic technologies hand in hand with biosensing techniques to enable single cell analysis of large numbers of cells to provide answers in drug development pipelines and diagnostics. Specific examples will be detailed in high-throughput patch-clamping, dielectrophoresis manipulation and impedance spectroscopy. New acoustic technologies will be introduced as a platform to enable complete integration into a single low-cost low-power disposable device for point-of-care applications. The link with end-user perspectives (clinicians, drug development) will be established and the beneficial impact on patient care will be discussed.