S5E9

Abstract

Injectable drug delivery systems with electrochemical actuation represent an emerging class of bioelectronics technology that offer programmable volume and flowrate capabilities for targeted drug delivery applications. Recent work establishes applications in behavioral neuroscience experiments involving small animals to study a pharmacological response without restricting animal motion. However, for programmable drug delivery, the available flowrate and drug delivery time modeling strategies fail to consider key variables of the bioelectronics delivery mechanism – microfluidic resistance and flexible membrane stiffness. Here we establish an analytical model that accounts for the key parameters involved in the delivery process – initial environmental pressure, initial gas volume, microfluidic resistance, flexible membrane geometry and mechanics, drug viscosity, electrical current and temperature – to control the relevant drug delivery parameters (i.e., delivery time, maximum flowrate) using only a unique combination of 3 non-dimensional parameters. This approach does not require numerical simulations and allows for a faster system optimization based on a scalable understanding of the non-dimensional parameters for different in vivo experiments in small animals. These results have relevance to the many emerging applications of programmable drug delivery in clinical studies within the neuroscience and broader biomedical communities.

Introduction of speaker

Raudel Avila is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Texas at El Paso. His current research focuses on modeling the mechanics and electromagnetics in bio integrated electronics for health care and biomedical applications. As a PhD candidate, he has published more than 40 journal papers, many as lead author in high profile journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids (JMPS). He is currently a National Science Foundation GRFP Fellow (2018) and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow (2018). In 2022, he was selected as a Future Trailblazer in Engineering by Purdue University for his potential impact in expanding representation and diversity in engineering. In 2019, Raudel received the Outstanding Researcher Award from the International Institute of Nanotechnology at Northwestern University.

Abstract

Cells consume energy through metabolism to drive the processes of life. While the molecules of major metabolic pathways have been identified and their biochemical properties characterized, the dynamics of metabolic pathways remain largely unknown. Metabolic activities vary both in time and in space during life processes including cell cycles, embryo development and alter in diseases. The spatiotemporal metabolic dynamics are mostly uncharacterized during these processes partly due to a lack of approaches to measure metabolic activities with sufficient resolution in living systems. In this talk, I will present a quantitative metabolic imaging method to measure metabolic state of cells with subcellular resolution. Interpreting the measurements with a biophysical model of mitochondrial metabolism, we are able to predict mitochondrial respiration rate with subcellular resolution. This technique has led to the discovery of previously unknown subcellular gradient of metabolic activities in mouse oocyte, which opens up new research avenues of connecting spatiotemporal metabolic variations with biological self-organization.

Introduction of speaker

Xingbo Yang is currently a postdoc at Dan Needleman lab at Harvard University. He obtained his PhD in soft condensed matter physics in 2015 at Syracuse University, where his research focused on modeling of active matter systems under the supervision of Cristina Marchetti. From 2015 to 2017, he worked at physics department of Northwestern University, focusing on cell mechanics in developmental biology. From 2017 to present, he is working on cell metabolism at Dan Needleman lab. He is interested in connecting cell metabolism with biological self-organization.