Prof. Utkan Demirci

Demirci's laboratory specializes in applying micro- and nano-scale technologies to problems in medicine. We have been focusing on three major problems.

(1) Global Health: More than 35 million HIV-infected people live in the developing world, where resources are scarce. We have been developing low-cost diagnostic devices for global health problems, such as counting CD4+ T lymphocytes in HIV infected patients at resource limited settings. The absolute number of CD4+ T lymphocytes in blood is vital for evaluating HIV-infected patients and has important prognostic and therapeutic implications. Currently, these values are obtained through using a flow cytometer, which is a very expensive method. Moreover, we aim to develop technologies to capture various cell types from blood using nanoparticles, and microscale technologies.

(2) Tissue Engineering: We apply our acoustic wave expertise to create picoliter-sized droplets that encapsulate single cells. Our objective is to develop technology to print these droplets for cell-by-cell 3-dimensional tissue generation.

(3) Microfluidics for Cryopreservation: Cell encapsulating droplets have medical applications including single to few cell cryopreservation. We have demonstrated that we can vitrify cells encapsulated in cryoprotectant droplets. This creates a new regime for biopreservation using cell encapsulating droplets. Being able to vitrify at low cryoprotectant concentrations decreases the possible osmotic shock to cells and cytotoxicity levels within the cell.