Luke P. Lee (Advisor)

Technologies for Blood Diagnostics

John Waldeisen
Luke P. Lee
Zev J. Gartner
Lee W. Riley
2012

For over three decades, the lateral flow assay (LFA) has remained the diagnostic gold standard for immunodetection. In the developed world, the diverse capabilities of these assays is relatively unknown. However in resource-limited settings, LFAs are the best diagnostic tool a clinician currently has other than a microscope to diagnose disease. Although most diseases are treatable and preventable, three diseases alone are responsible for killing more than 5 million people each year: HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis (TB). A devastating lack of diagnostic accessibility in the developing...

Design Considerations for CMOS-Integrated Hall-effect Magnetic Bead Detectors for Biosensor Applications

Karl Skucha
Bernhard E. Boser
Ming C. Wu
Luke P. Lee
2012

This dissertation presents a design methodology for on-chip magnetic bead label detectors based on Hall-effect sensors to be used for biosensor applications. Signal errors caused by the label-binding process and other factors that place constraints on the minimum detector area are quantified and adjusted to meet assay accuracy standards. The methodology is demonstrated by designing an 8,192 element Hall sensor array implemented in a commercial 0.18 μm CMOS process with single mask post-processing. The array can quantify a one percent surface coverage of 2.8 μm beads in thirty seconds...

Microfluidic Modules for Enabling Point-of-Care Biopsy-based Cancer Diagnostics

Debkishore Mitra
Luke P. Lee
Shuvo Roy
Lee W. Riley
2013

The analyses of patient tumor biopsy samples and biopsy-based diagnostics have emerged as important tools for cancer diagnostics. However, the techniques employed currently are restricted to centralized laboratories as they are time-consuming, manual labor intensive and vary considerably in their effectiveness amongst institutions and countries. Point of Care testing (POCT) for cancer with the capacity for multiplexed detection of numerous biomarkers in biopsy samples in a rapid, precise and portable manner is emerging as an area with enormous potential to disseminate universal...

Droplet-Based Microfluidic Systems: Finger-Powered Pumps, Reactors and Magnetic Capsules

Kosuke Iwai
Liwei Lin
Albert P. Pisano
Luke P. Lee
2014

The combination of microfabrication and microfluidics has enabled a variety of opportunities in making new tools for biological and diagnostic applications. For example, microdroplets-based systems have attracted lots of attentions in recent years due to potential advantages in controlled environments with fast reaction time, high-throughput and low noises. This work presents a number of advanced microfluidic systems in process, control and manipulation of microdroplets, including finger-powered pumps to generate microdroplets, continuous-flow rupture reactors for the rupture and...

Assays and Tools for Biomolecular Analysis in Remote and Low-Resource Settings

Richard Henrikson
Luke P. Lee
2015

The global population faces significant challenges in not only improving health care, but even just in maintaining it. Environmental and economic disparities are increasingly creating a massive population that lacks adequate medical attention. Traditional tools employed to detect, monitor, and treat sickness are woefully inadequate in the face of this grand challenge in medicine. However, a new generation of technologies is under development that promises to increase both the access and the quality of care available on a global scale. These tools provide simple but powerful means for...

Integrated Microfluidic Molecular Diagnostics for Point-of-Care

Charlie (Erh-Chia) Yeh
Luke P. Lee
Ming C. Wu
2015

Ideal point-of-care medical diagnostic devices are low cost assays capable of performing quantitative on-site rapid testing with high sensitivity and minimal manual steps.

Current mainstream assays have several key limitations. Take, for instance, the common lateral flow assay—e.g. the pregnancy dipstick test. Such assays produce rapid results at low cost; however, they are mostly qualitative tests yielding only positive/negative results rather than quantitative figures. Other standard immunosorbant assays such as ELISA yield quantitative results but require...

Microfluidic Analysis of Vertebrate Red Blood Cell Characteristics

Kathryn Fink
Dorian Liepmann
Luke P. Lee
2016

Continuous multidisciplinary advancements in medicine, science and engineering have led to the rise of biomedical microfluidic devices for clinical diagnoses, laboratory research for modeling and screening of drugs or disease states, and implantable organs such as artificial kidneys. Blood is often the biological fluid of choice for these purposes. However, unique hemodynamic properties observed only in microscale channels complicate experimental repeatability and reliability.

For vessels with 10-300μm diameters, red blood cell properties such as deformability...

Integrated Molecular Diagnostic Platform

Byungrae Cho
Luke P. Lee
Ming C. Wu
Randall J. Lee
2017

Infectious and non-communicable diseases impose a global burden of health on both developing and developed countries despite technological advancements in medicine and healthcare. In this perspective, point-of-care testing (POCT) has been paid attention as an area with enormous potential to solve this problem. Point-of- care molecular diagnostic enables to provide diagnoses from clinical samples to clinicians without wasting time such as sample transporting or sample preprocessing. However, most of nucleic acid diagnostics still are performed in central health facilities because they...

Micro-Fabricated Shells for Mechanical and Fluidic Interconnects

Phillip Stupar
Albert P. Pisano
Liwei Lin
Luke P. Lee
2001
Three micro-fabricated shell processes are developed in this work, each tailored to a specific application. The first is a two-wafer molding process used to fabricate polysilicon shell suspensions that are very light and stiff. The second is a single crystal silicon...

Bubble-Actuated Planar Microvalves

Alexandros Papavasiliou
Albert P. Pisano
Dorian Liepmann
Luke P. Lee
2001

This work describes the development of low-power bubble-actuated planar micro gate valves. The work includes the design of the gate valve, the development of electrolysis bubbles as a low power actuator, and a novel fabrication procedure that allows these valves to be integrated with other planar fluidic devices and controlling circuitry. The operation of the valves is demonstrated and valve performance is measured in terms of leakage, power consumption, and cycle time.

The low-power, bubble-actuated, planar micro gate valves consist of a silicon gate that is thrust across a...