Immune Status-Detecting Biochip for Infants

Researchers at the University of Michigan are working on developing a bedside microfluidic device that will be able to more immediately detect the immune status of sepsis-suffering infants. This interdisciplinary team is made up of researchers from both the University of Michigan College of Engineering and Medical School. The project received initial seed funding through University of Michigan's MCubed research initiative.

Transcript

00:00:00 I got started on this project by asking the overall question of uh why do children die in the ICU we're proposing to develop some highly integrated functional micro food device which can allow the Physicians or clinicians to examine the immune status of a very small newborn babies we hit the roadblock of how do we measure what the what the immune system is doing and more

00:00:27 specifically how do we measure the component of each individual cell type the convention method to to examine the immune status of patient is not real time it takes time uh normally takes 24 hours if not longer during that kind of course of time the patients uh immune status can immediately change all of the tests that we do we can get on on just about anybody the real limiting factor

00:00:56 has been to turn that into a true bedside activity and and bedside measurement our chip is designed so that we can just take some small amount of blood from the patients and then they can just specifically just pick up some particular immune cell type we can stimulate these and cells on the chip using some chemical which just mimicking

00:01:25 some viral attack and then we can just optically detect really ACC accurate information on this immune cells status or functionalities very very quickly to have a real time measurement of the different types of cells and what their functional activity is is really a a truly transforming kind of characteristic mq is a is a very uh

00:01:52 novel mechanism to allow people to uh propose new ideas without any prary results and bring together from across different disciplines allow them to receive C funding without external review and uh then the team can start generating results and see uh seek external funding so really this mcbe give uh give people here freedom to choose to pursue some really high impact

00:02:22 ideas I'm very excited about this project because we can feel that our engineering skills or technology that we are developing here are really have a huge impact on clinical applications and that we feel that we are contributing to uh the development or advancement of new uh medical Technologies which we hope will save a lot of patients and you know babies who are suffering from infectious

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