Researchers Aim to Develop Cell Editing Device for Gene Therapy Microfluidics offer promising solutions to diagnostic and therapeutic challenges in the medical field. By combining biology, chemistry, engineering, physics, nanotechnology, and more, microfluidics manipulates cells and fluids on small chips at the nanoscale. That’s because at the nanoscale cell properties and characteristics behave differently.
blood. Then a voltage is applied to open cells and deliver gene editing agents to activate or suppress genes.
The technology manipulates cells without touching or tagging them with magnetic particles. Touching and using magnetic particles can separate cells, but it’s unlikely they are suitable for culture, which is another long-term Using microfluidic technologies, Soojung goal of the team. Culturing patient cells can Claire Hur and Thomas Pisanic are aiming to be difficult since cells often die once they are develop a microfluidic primary cell editing removed from a patient’s body. Furthermore, platform (pCEP) for personal gene therapy cells can normally only divide a limited numwith an award from the National Institutes ber of times before they stop proliferating. But of Health. Hur is the Clare Boothe Luce asthrough genetic modifications it is possible to sistant professor of Mechanical Engineering and an associate faculty member at the INBT, keep cells dividing, making them available for and Pisanic is an assistant research scientist at further studies. the INBT. Hur’s and Pisanic’s work has potential appliHur and Pisanic want pCEP to capture cells of cations to cancer biology, diagnostics, and iminterest and then deliver biological materials munotherapy. By using microfluidics, it can to edit their genome. First, the platform will help reduce medical costs and the time it takes integrate a purification method to separate to run tests. It also offers safer alternatives for and collect the cells from patient samples like testing the efficacy of a therapy. research 9
