Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1050827
38 PCB007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2018 Sahr Scholar in Pediatric Bioengineering, whose heart regeneration lab is part of the Wallace Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineer- ing at Georgia Tech and Emory University. They used neonatal rat ventricular myocytes and car- diac fibroblasts to illustrate the multiparametric cell profiling ability of the array for drug screen- ing. The results were published in the Royal So- ciety of Chemistry's journal Lab on a Chip. Monitoring cellular responses in multiphys- ical domains and holistic multiparametric cel- lular profiling should also prove beneficial in screening out chemical compounds that could have harmful effects on specific organs, ac- cording to Jong Seok Park, a post-doctoral fel- low in Wang's lab and a leading author of the study. Many drugs have been withdrawn from the market after discoveries that they had toxic effects on the heart or liver, for example. This platform should enable researchers to compre- hensively test for organ toxicity and other side effects at the initial phases of drug discovery. The experimental chip may be useful for oth- er applications, including personalized medi- cine (e.g., testing cancer cells from a particular patient). "Patient-to-patient variation is huge, even with the same type of drug," said Wang. The cellular interface array could be used to see which combination of existing drugs would give the best response and find the optimum dose that is most effective with minimum tox- icity to healthy cells. The chip is capable of actuation as well as sensing. In the future, Wang said that cellular data from the chip could be uploaded and pro- cessed, and based on that, commands for new actuation or data acquisition could be sent to the chip automatically and wirelessly. He envi- sions multiple rooms containing culture cham- bers with millions of chips in fully automated facilities, "automatically doing new drug selec- tion for us," he said. Beyond these applications, Wang noted the scientific value of the research itself. Integrat- ed circuits and nanoelectronics are some of the most sophisticated technology platforms creat- ed by humans. Living cells, on the other hand, are complex products produced through billions of years of natural selection and evolution. "The central theme of our research is how we can leverage the best platform created by nature with the best platform created by hu- mans," he said. "Can we let them work togeth- er to create hybrid systems that achieve capa- bilities beyond biology only or electronics only systems? The fundamental scientific question we are addressing is how we can let inorgan- ic electronics better interface with organic liv- ing cells." These researchers also participated in the related studies: Doohwan Jung, Adam Wang, Taiyun Chi, Sensen Li, and Moez K. Aziz from the School of Electrical and Computer Engi- neering at Georgia Tech; and Sandra I. Grijalva and Michael N. Sayegh from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University. The research was funded in part by the Na- tional Science Foundation CAREER Award and ECCS CCSS Program, National Science Foun- dation Graduate Research Fellowship (grant numbers DGE-1148903 and DGE-1650044), Office of Naval Research, and Semiconduc- tor Research Corporation SSB roadmap con- sortium. PCB007 Wireless Device Aids Breast Cancer Patient Recovery by Joanna Wilson, Imperial College London An international team led by Imperial Col- lege London and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP- SRC) has developed a wireless bio-patch as part of the Smart Sensing for Surgery project. Incorporating 1.8 x 1.1 cm electronics mea- suring, the bio-patch was attached to pa- tients for 48 hours following breast recon- struction surgery. It successfully performed continuous monitoring of the level of oxygen saturation in transferred tissue—a key indi- cator of whether there is a risk of reconstruc- tion failure.

