Microfluidics in 5 Minutes! Podcast

Our annual Summer Education Series starts next week at Boston University. The subject this year is Microfluidics. Click here for more information on attending.

Today I spent 5 minutes with Dr. Mehmet Toner and Dr. Daniel Irimira both of MGH. Wikipedia has a great article on Microfluidics, but it couldn't hope to get as deep as we will on the subject all July. Most striking will be the ability to manage HIV treatment in developing nations and to identify cancer cells out of billions of healthy ones.

Some uses for Microfluidics:

• Gene-chips or DNA microarrays can probe at the expression level of genes       
• Lab-on-a-chip devices can perform precise biochemical reactions using tiny   amounts of reagents with exquisite sensitivity       
• Microdevices that probe cells in a massively parallel manner, at single cell resolutions, provide unmatched opportunity to investigate cells at the systems level
• Cell patterning approaches can create tissue engineered systems or probe into cell-cell interactions in complex tissue systems
• Point-of-care devices process minute amounts of whole blood to separate and count different lymphocyte populations or perform high-throughput, fine-time-resolution gene expression analysis in arrays of cells.

We are also webcasting all the sessions so if you're not in Boston you can still participate live. Please email me here for information on the webcast. (mwyoung@partners.org)

Enjoy this weeks podcast on Microfluidics in 5 Minutes!