Luke P. Lee (Advisor)

Development of point-of-care (POC) molecular diagnostic devices is critical for the global healthcare and personalized medicine. Current POC molecular diagnostic platforms are based on polymeric or glass substrates. If we use them frequently for molecular diagnostics in both developed and developing countries, the swamping of disposable medical waste is serious problem. In order to solve this problem, we are developing integrative paper-based molecular diagnostic devices (IPMD) with the capability of nucleic acid detection of HIV from blood, which allow safe and proper disposal for...

One of the key avenues to improving global health is to diagnose and control infectious diseases, such as HIV and malaria. Viral-specific nucleic acid (NA) amplification (such as polymerase chain reaction, PCR) is often used to meet such a requirement; however, complicated blood sample preparation (NA purification) by sophisticated equipments inevitably restricts its applications for portable point-of-care diagnosis, especially in third-world countries. For instance, solid phase NA extraction methods require a multistep protocol (NA binding, washing and elution) with pipetting and...

A new era of drug discovery and development is being marched with the concept of “personalized medicine”. “Organ-on-a-chips or OCs” are one of the movements, which are to recapitulate 3-dimensional organ models in microfluidic culture platforms. By combining iPSC-derived human organ cells, individuals’ physiological response can be investigated so that the needs of animal model, inadequately representing human physiology, will be vanished in drug development in a near future. Herein,we are challenging the development of liver-, heart-, and brain-on-a-chip for the organs most...

It is desirable for medical diagnostic assays to have portable and low cost pumping schemes. Although capillary loading is the most common example, it cannot load dead-end channels, often have fibres that obstruct optics, and have surface treatment or geometrical constraints. On the other hand, conventional degas pumping lacks flow control, speed, and reliability. Here we report a new portable pumping system that does not require any peripheral equipment or external power sources/controls. Compared with conventional degas pumping, it has ~8 times less standard deviation in speed, is...