Date: October 28, 2021
Time: 3:00pm
Abstract:
Diabetes is a chronic, metabolic disease characterized by elevated levels of glucose. According to world healthcare organization, more than 422 million people worldwide have diabetes, the majority living in low-and middle-income countries, and 1.6 million deaths are directly attributed to diabetes each year.
In this talk, two technologies will be presented for tracking diabetes with the goal of improving the quality-of-life diabetic patients. First, a microfluidic platform will be presented that can continuously and simultaneously measure physiological levels of circulating glucose and insulin in vivo with picomolar sensitivity and sub- second temporal resolution. This assay (called “real-time ELISA” or RT-ELISA) integrates molecular probes into a bead-based fluorescence assay, wherein analyte concentrations are measured with a highly sensitive optical readout using a specially designed microfluidic chip. In the second part of the talk, a transdermal biosensor based on hydrogel microneedles for on-needle and reagentless capture and detection of glucose will be presented. The reagentless fluorescence assay for minimally invasive detection (RFMID) integrates a novel, rapid, and simple approach to link aptamer probes- short single-stranded DNA capable of specific binding to a target molecule- to the hydrogel matrix. The RFMID has been employed for tracking rising and falling levels of glucose in an animal model of diabetes. Specifically, the RFMID can accurately track severe hypoglycemia range, which cannot be detected using the commercially available glucose monitoring devices.
The proposed RT-ELISA and RFMID techniques are expected to pave the way for the next generation of real-time, continuous biosensors.
Biography:
Mahla Poudineh is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. She received her PhD in electrical engineering (with a minor in biomedical engineering) from the University of Toronto in 2016. Prior to joining Waterloo, she completed postdoctoral training in the Department of Pharmaceutical Science at the University of Toronto, and at the School of Medicine at Stanford University, in 2017 and 2019, respectively. She received a B.Sc. (2010) and M.Sc. (2012) in electrical engineering, both from the University of Tehran, Iran. Her research interests include developing bio-sensing approaches for therapeutics and diagnostics purposes and translating biomedical devices to the clinic.