Designing Diagnostic and Prognostic Platforms for Analysis and Probing Disease Emergence

Abstract

The emerging era of personalized medicine relies on medical decisions, practices, and products being tailored to the individual patient. Point-of-care systems, at the heart of this model, play two important roles. First, they are required for identifying subjects for optimal therapies based on their genetic make-up and epigenetic profile. Second, they will be used for assessing the progression of such therapies. Central to this vision is designing systems that, with minimal user-intervention, can transduce complex signals from biosystems in complement with clinical information to inform medical decision within point-of-care settings. To reach our ultimate goal of developing point-of-care systems and realizing personalized medicine, we are taking a multistep systems-level approach towards Table of Contents Chapter 1: Analyzing biomarker profiles in blood serum to enable early detection of cancer 6  Nanoslit design for ion conductivity gradient enhanced dielectrophoresis for ultrafast biomarker enrichment in physiological media 9  Quantifying spatio-temporal dynamics of biomarker pre-concentration and depletion in microfluidic systems using their statistical distribution 30  Frequency-selective enrichment of biomolecules in physiological media based on electrical double-layer induced polarization 40 Chapter 2: Probing mitochondrial morphological patterns as a new cancer biomarker 56  Predictive analytics platform for studying cancer and neurodegenerative diseases by probing mitochondrial morphological patterns as a new biomarker 59  Label-free quantification of alterations in intracellular mitochondrial dynamics by monitoring cytoplasmic conductivity 74 Publications & Patents