报告摘要
The goal of our lab is to develop state-of-art bioengineered tools to address unmet biomedical needs and biological questions.
By taking interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches and having a team of experts in material sciences, biomedical engineering, biology and medicine, we aim to develop next generation stem cell-based therapeutics and rapid disease diagnostics.
Since its discovery, stem cell therapy holds enormous potential to treat a variety of devastating diseases, such as diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases. Their clinical efficiency, however, has not been well-established. Besides the bone marrow transplantation, only a few stem cell therapies have been approved in developed countries like Canada and United States. Our research focuses on understanding and ultimately controlling the fate of the transplanted stem cells in the body (i.e. where they go and what they do biologically and therapeutically), which will lead to more effective and safer clinical medicine.
Furthermore, we are developing diagnostic tools to tackle the global challenge in rapid detection of diseases. Integrated Comprehensive Droplet Digital Detection (IC 3D) technology is a platform that we developed to address this task. By incorporating microfluidics, nanoparticles and aptamer sensors, IC 3D can detect single bacteria in 1mL of unprocessed blood within 2-3 hours with high sensitivity and specificity. Another advantage of our IC 3D system is that it is extremely versatile in terms of targeted disease models, including blood sugar level, circulating tumor cells and multidrug resistant organisms.