Samantha Grist, one of ECE’s Ph.D. candidates, will be speaking at this year’s Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening Conference in February. Her research with Professor Karen Cheung in the Bio Medical Micro Devices Lab has reproduced conditions of hypoxia in a microfuildic device. Using this device, researchers can mimic conditions near tumors to better study the effects of cancer treatments. In an interviewed with Lisa Heiden for Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News Samantha says, “I was able to successfully reproduce time-varying oxygen levels on similar time scales to those in the body during transient hypoxia, as well as complex, spatial oxygen gradients like those near tumor blood vessels. Employing this device to mimic in vivo oxygen profiles in vitro could facilitate the development of a screening methodology that better predicts how a given drug will act in the body.” Her talk at the conference will be titled, “A microfluidic device with integrated oxygen sensors for the cell-based screening of cancer treatments under transient hypoxia”.
