Robert A. Pritzker Lecture: Rashid Bashir, Ph.D. - BioMEMS and Biomedical Nanotechnology: From Lab on Chip to Printing Cellular Machines

The Pritzker Institute of Biomedical Science and Engineering, along with Armour College of Engineering's Biomedical Engineering Department, will host a seminar featuring Rashid Bashir, PhD, Professor and Head of the Department of Bioengineering at Carle Illinois College of Medicine at
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Integrating biology, medicine, and fabrication methods at the micro and nanoscale offers tremendous opportunities for solving important problems in biology and medicine and enabling various diagnostics, therapeutics, and tissue engineering applications. Microfluidics and Lab-on-Chip can be very beneficial to realize practical applications in the detection of disease markers, counting of specific cells from whole blood, and identification of pathogens, at point-of-care. Small sample sizes and electrical methods for sensitive analysis of target entities can result in easy-to-use, one-time-use assays that can be used at point-of-care. In this talk, we will present our work on the detection of T cells for the diagnostics of HIV AIDs for global health, the development of a CBC (Complete Blood Cell) analysis on a chip, electrical detection of multiplexed nucleic acid amplification reactions, and the detection of epigenetic markers on DNA at the single-molecule level. While the above-mentioned devices are built with PDMS or silicon using microfabrication approaches, bio-printing with stereolithography can be a very powerful technology to produce bio-hybrid devices made of polymers and cells, such as biological machines and soft robotics. Such complex cellular systems will be a major challenge for the next decade and beyond, requiring knowledge from tissue engineering, synthetic biology, micro-fabrication and nanotechnology, systems biology, and developmental biology. As these “biological machines” increase in capabilities, exhibit emergent behavior, and potentially reveal the ability for self-assembly and self-repair, questions can arise about the ethical implications of this work. These devices could have potential applications in drug delivery, power generation, and other biomimetic systems.