Printing of Collagen microgels

Developing technology capable of onsite medical diagnostics is crucial for health-care delivery in clinical and emergency settings. To perform on-site diagnostics, health-care practitioners need compact, inexpensive, and user-friendly equipment. Alentic Microscience has developed a system that uses small volumes of blood for cell counting and serum tests, occurring at the site of blood extraction. This system makes single molecular layers of reagents on the sensor surface, which when exposed to light allow the system to provide valuable diagnostics about the sample. The proposed project will increase the system’s range, by moving from the single monolayers to 3D gels. By using 3D gels, the increased volume will allow the addition of multiple molecular tags to the sample that can identify and quantify multiple components simultaneously. This work will increase the dynamic range of the current technology, allowing it to be useful for biological diagnostics in even more situations.

Faculty Supervisor:

Laurent Kreplak

Student:

Gurkaran Chowdhry

Partner:

Alentic Microscience Inc

Discipline:

Geography / Geology / Earth science

Sector:

Medical devices

University:

Dalhousie University