Lab News

We had a great day at Wasven farm with a productive research retreat followed by chocolate workshop. BDL members proved well their chocolate-crafting skills as well! 

We celebrated the x-mas with a potluck lunch where we organized an image contest for our 2024 calendar. With the tasty food, it was great to vote for the best images captured by the group members. Special thanks to Doke for organizing this event!

Esmée modeled the three-dimensional (3D) microenvironment of spinal cord injury using a microfluidic chip. 

Ana Carina Manjua fell in love with biomedical research during her master's at the New University of Lisbon, when studying electroconductive materials as biobatteries for pacemakers. During her PhD at the Instituto Superior Técnico in the same city, she worked on building a microchip to regenerate blood vessels. After that, she worked 1.5 years in a biomaterials company. Manjua returned to research last March as a EuroTech postdoc at the TU/e Biosensors and Devices Lab.
She will again work on microchips, this time in the context of cardiovascular diseases. The goal is to remodel cardiac tissue on a chip and recreate its micro-environment in order to simulate the disease and find ways to regenerate the tissue. Manjua’s research will include the microchip design, developing a hydrogel for electromagnetic stimulation to regenerate cells, building a stretchable platform – at the Swiss University EPFL – to simulate cardiac rhythm, and arranging a computational interface, before she can actually study the cardiac tissue.

This talk covered how we handle the digital microfluidics systems in the scope of regenerative medicine and our attempt to improve the system to create unique cellular microenvironments. We are honored to be a part of this community! Looking forward to joining the next editions.

During the research retreat, we talked about the group dynamics,  research attitude, and made some planning. We also made teambuilding activities, which were also definitely lots of fun!

Members of Biosensors and Devices Lab and Biointerface Science went on the ice. Some of us skated hard, others sent their good wishes from the sideline. Either way was fun!

Our lab's first bachelor end project students Tess, Valerie, and Christian graduated successfully! They collaboratively worked on materials to mimic ECM and how the stiffness of the environment relates to cell behavior from different perspectives including diffusion time, cell morphology, and stiffness changes.  Their studies were guided by Oksana and Esmee. Well done! 

Having a multicultural group comes with its perks. This year we joined forces with BiS and everyone baked or cooked their favorite dishes. The end result was amazingly delicious!

We also voted for the best images right out of the lab, submitted by our members. The new year's calendar is in the making with original art! Such a happy ending to 2022. 

Emy worked on light-responsive dynamic surfaces embedded in microfluidics platform to study immune cell-material interactions during her studies. She found that macrophages respond to height and stiffness changes at various levels.

 This year we collaborate with Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek to demonstrate atherosclerosis-on-chip.  Dutch Design week is held between 22-30 October 2022.

How does “design” change its meaning in functional (or a word that Piet prefers) and scientific perspectives?

Through our journey to bring different designers collaborating, we noticed that the word “design” can bear different meanings. Therefore, we share what we found out: Piet (PHE) and Burcu (Eindhoven University of Technology, Biomedical Engineering Department) joined forces to approach functional design from different perspectives. While Piet is good at designing macro-scale objects that find use in households, Burcu designs micro-scale objects for research purposes.  

For Piet, design is a word to create a functional product that he can foresee its use, while for Burcu design is a word to create a functional platform to explore the unforeseen, mostly for the understanding of medical problems.

Hereby, Piet and Burcu present a micron-scale construct made using the logo of Piet Hein Eek (PHE). This design mimics the branching veins in the body to study atherosclerosis, a health-related disorder resulting in clogged veins, which require the placement of stents. The logo of PHE appeared as an easy-to-fabricate and -operate design, therefore it was interesting to choose it to model the blood flow velocity in veins.

Through simulations, we found that the branching sides having a slower flow rate when compared to the main channels. Through experiments, real cells reacted to the flow by accumulating in low-flow-rate regions and migrating in high-flow rate regions. Our observation is in accordance with medical findings that regions with more cell accumulation were predicted to be more prone to atherosclerosis. Therefore, we can use this model to study the biology of this disease further and propose new treatment strategies!

Esmee worked on the development of a pulse-on-chip microfluidic platform with magnetic hydrogel valve to study mechanobiology during her M.Sc. studies. Today She successfully defended her work. We were really happy to have her around! Good luck with your future work Esmee, but before it is the well-deserved holiday time!

This year, we run a pilot of the Lab on a Chip Microdevices course. Today we finished the first lab session, and it was so much fun to make chips together. Our student team is dealing with a real problem assigned by Emultech, a high-tech campus company. The project is about generating stable water-in-water droplets. This challenge could not be easier without the help of Lanhui and Kalpit. Exciting!  

In her M.Sc. work, Minne assessed the dynamic interplay of shear stress and surface topographies on hepatocytes in a microfluidic platform.

In her thesis, she embedded surface patterns into custom-designed microfluidic chip to enable long-term hepatocyte cultures.

Joska will continue her journey in professional life at Genmab as a research associate in cell banking and transient production.