The laboratory has been using our Langer peristaltic pumps for flow experiments in devices with saturated cell culture. A problem we’ve been having with microporous membranes was the shearing of the cells off it, which was attributed to the deflection caused by the pulsing of the pump. So we decided to mount the capacitors to…

This data comes from our collaborators in Switzerland who are working on a BBB culture model using NPN. In this study they are looking at the effects of co-culture on barrier function. The co-culture is with pericytes and a vascular brain endothelial cell line that they are cultivating. The permeability is measured with the passage…

In light of technical difficulties associated with the current liftoff device design, I’ve been working on a slight alteration to the design with an eye towards reducing leaking and improving the shape of the flow in the dialysate chamber. The shape of the blood conduit has been demonstrated to be successful in distributing the flow fairly…

LabChip_20160430

Hello everyone,   After some work on GoDaddy’s side, we have fixed the HTTP error when trying to upload images. Please let me know if you encounter this issue in the future. Cheers!

While experimental results are still forthcoming, I thought I’d make a post about the nature of the model I’ve constructed for ECMO. This model is the one that my experiments are seeking to validate; so to be clear, this model is founded entirely in theory for now. ECMO shares some obvious similarities with hemodialysis — blood…

I attempted to clear the large format lift-off devices (from Josh). I was unable to clear, in a reasonable amount of time (< 2 hours) by pumping IPA. So I switched to PBS then Blood and blue-dyed PBS (dye is estimated to be between 10 nm and 500 nm, obviously the amount of dye near…

From my last blog post, was talked about designing an assay whereby the NPN filter would exclude DNA-conjugated gold nanoparticles while allowing short DNA to pass. Since then, I (with the help of my colleague Dan Tassier) have been wrestling with gold nanoparticles to find conditions in which the nanoparticles were stable, while also allowing…

As I’m approaching the end of my time here at UofR, there’s one last thing I’d like to fit into my thesis: experimental validation of the ECMO model. In this post I’m going to describe the experimental design, and in a future post I’ll discuss the model in more detail (pending a more complete set…

It has been a constant theme in our EO efforts as well as our energy harvesting efforts that our electrodes need to be as close as possible to the surface to see an effect. In Jess’s early EO work, we found that our chips could be used as EO pumps that were vastly more thermodynamically…