Projects

This is a short list of some of the projects ongoing in the lab. Please contact us for more information about any of them.

miRNA Isolation from Human Thyroid Tumor FNAs:

In collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Rosen at BUMC, we are working on high throughput molecular screens for thyroid cancer diagnostics using minimally invasive fine needle aspiration in combination with microscale sample preparation. This project is funded through the NIH R25 grant for Cross-disciplinary Training in Nanotechnology for Cancer.

Point of Care Nucleic Acid Test for Influenza:

This NIH funded project is focused on testing a complete microfluidic system for sample preparation, nucleic acid amplification and detection for the diagnosis of respiratory infections at the point of care. We work with the BMC Emergency Department and Dr. Nira Pollock of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center on this project.

Point of Care test for Clostridium difficile:

This NIH funded project is focused on point of care testing for infectious diarrheas. The integrated chip takes a stool sample as the input and performs a molecular test to identify the causative agent. Our partner on this project is Dr. Satish Singh at BMC and the Boston VA Hospital. We are working on both instrumented and minimally instrumented approaches at detecting and diagnosing infectious diarrheas.

Sample Preparation for POC HIV Diagnostic:

This NIH funded project is a collaboration with wave80 Biosciences (San Francisco, CA). We are working on viral RNA extraction from whole blood input samples.

SNAP: System for Nucleic Acid Purification:

This project is a collaboration with the MIT IIH and the Fraunhofer Center for Manufacturing Innovation and is currently funded by PATH. We have successfully isolated viral RNA from whole blood samples containing HIV virions.  We are currently piloting this technology with well characterized samples from infected patients.