Abstract:

Over the last two decades, microfluidics has emerged as a technology with significant impact on medical research and clinical applications. The ability to manipulate fluids at the microscale has led to new methods to manipulate and study biological entities. During this presentation, I will talk about three different systems that we developed to tackle different biomedical applications. The first system intended to study cancer cell survival and death following stimulation with Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF). Using the system, cells were selectively exposed to brief pulses of TNF, as short as 8 s. We studied the survival and death pathways in cells, and preliminary results suggested that short pulses of TNF stimulation can provoke early cancer cell death. The second system I will be talking about is the Microfluidic Quadrupole (MQ), which constitutes the first experimental demonstration and characterization of fluidic quadrupoles. We used the MQ to manipulate concentration gradients of Interleukin-8 atop human neutrophils cultured in a Petri dish. We challenged neutrophils with stationary and moving gradients and studied their dynamics during adhesion, polarization, and migration. Lastly, I will discuss our recent experiments in using the microfluidic technology to capture circulating tumor cells from blood samples taken from cancer patients. Isolated cells were stained and numerated to correlate with the cancer progression.

Biography:
Dr. Mohammad Qasaimeh is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). He established the Advanced Microfluidics and Microdevices Laboratory (AMMLab) at NYUAD, where his group is focused in developing microfluidic and MEMS devices for biomedical applications and point of care diagnostics. Prior to joining NYUAD, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School, and earned his PhD degree in Biomedical Engineering from McGill University. Dr. Qasaimeh received several prestigious fellowships and awards during his career including the NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Alexander Graham Bell Graduate Scholarship (CGSD3), and the FQRNT Students-Researchers Stars Award. Dr. Qasaimeh research has been published in several peer-reviewed journals including Nature Communications, Lab on a Chip, PLOS Biology, Scientific Reports, and Biomedical Microdevies.