Dr. Mehdi Javanmard
Department of Biochemistry, Stanford University
Stanford Genome Technology Center
January 22, 2013 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 540 Cory Hall, DOP Center Conference Room
Host: Michel Maharbiz
The high cost of diagnostic exams in the clinical setting has resulted in a healthcare crisis both nationally and globally. The lack of sensitivity in current state-of-the-art biosensing platforms used in the clinical setting has resulted in slow and expensive diagnostic exams. This makes it economically unfeasible to regularly screen patients for a wide panel of biomarkers, making impossible the diagnosis of diseases at early stages while still curable. By making use of the advantages offered by micro and nanotechnologies, we aim to develop sensing platforms which will decrease cost, increase assay speed, and improve limit of detection in bimolecular assays. Increasing sensitivity can enable earlier detection, and also can allow for identification of low-abundance markers that are not detectable with current techniques. Also of importance is to resolve various bottlenecks that currently impede the ability of a protein assay to be performed in high throughput, such as antibody cross reactivity. Currently in antibody arrays, antibody cross reactivity limits the ability to analyze more than 20 markers in parallel, which has paralyzed advance in protein biomarker discovery for cancer biology and other fields. A separate problem is that, despite their clinical relevance, detection of small molecule metabolites is difficult using gold standard fluorescent techniques due to the need for labeling them which will result in chemically modifying their structure. In my talk, I will present an ultra-sensitive electronic microfluidic technique we have developed, referred to as decoupled digital detection. Using this technique we have demonstrated the ability to detect protein activity at sub-attomolar levels, roughly five orders of magnitude more sensitive than conventional plate format fluorescent assays currently used in the clinical setting. Using ultra-sensitivity, we have also shown that low detection limit can be compromised in favor of speed resulting in a 50X increase in the speed of genetic testing. Afterwards, I will discuss the multisite electronic platform which we have shown results in at least 10X reduction of cross-reactivity in antibody arrays. I will discuss how we are using plasmonic nanostructures for metabolite detection in new-born screening and also microfluidic sample preparation methods for purifying metabolites. Finally I will talk about an electronic nano-probe for label-free detection of proteins.
stanford.edu/~mehdij; med.stanford.edu/sgtc
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