"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
Some of the major obstacles preventing the successful creation of stem cell therapies include accurately and reproducibly controlling the differentiation of stem cells, and creating a sufficient amount of cells for therapeutic procedures. These obstacles can be overcome by carefully controlling the growth conditions of stem cells, but current cell culture techniques do not provide enough accuracy and reproducibility. Furthermore, limitations in current cell culture protocols hamper fundamental cellular studies, such as the interaction between cells and how it affects cellular growth and replication. Increased control over cells in culture has the power to unlock the potential of cell-based therapies, increase fundamental knowledge of cellular processes, and enable studies of individual cell behavior in response to stimuli, such as in drug screening.
The intellectual merit of the proposed research is the design and fabrication of an optically controlled cell culturing and harvesting platform that will enable the controlled culture of specific single cells with an unprecedented degree of accuracy. The optically controlled cell culturing platform can be used to isolate specific cells of interest for further culturing, harvest specific cells from a larger culture population, or position cells in specific patterns and locations for controlled cell culturing. These functionalities will enable the improvement of stem cell treatments by enriching the desired cells in culture. In addition, many other types of cell cultures will benefit from the enrichment capability of the optically controlled cell culturing platform. Furthermore, the platform will enable more detailed fundamental research into cell-cell interactions between homogeneous and heterogeneous populations of cells.
The broader impacts of the proposed research will enable biologists to study cells in culture with an unparalleled degree of control. This has the potential to further the understanding of cellular processes. Furthermore, more accurate cell culture conditions have the potential to overcome major obstacles in stem cell research, enabling the use of stem cells in therapeutic applications for diseases and conditions such as Alzheimer?s disease, heart disease, type I diabetes, stroke, and spinal cord injuries. To perform the proposed research, graduate and undergraduate students from underrepresented groups will be recruited from the successful Native Hawaiian Science & Engineering Mentorship Program and the student chapters of the Society of Women Engineers and IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society at the University of Hawaii. The proposed research will give the Native Hawaiian and female students an opportunity to work on a cutting-edge research project in biomedical microdevices, creating a graduate-level education and research program that will train a future generation of role models for underrepresented minority groups. Outreach to K-12 students and the community will foster interest in biomedical microdevice research at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
