Conveners
TS-6-1 COVID & Biomicrofluidics (DPMB Symposium) / COVID et biomicrofluidique (Symposium DPMB)
- Melanie Campbell (University of Waterloo)
Microfluidic technology has been used in many application areas including diagnostics, drug delivery and drug discovery. In drug discovery, microfluidic devices have been used to perform combinatorial experiments where several drug candidates can be exposed to biological materials such as protein drug targets, cells or small organisms simultaneously at various concentrations in order to...
Non-invasive liquid biopsies offer hope for point-of-care glimpse into the molecular hallmarks of the disease, including drug resistance and targets. Among different types of liquid biopsy platforms, tumor-derived exosomes (EXs) are unique due to their intercellular tumor communication and serve as carriers of biological information. Exosomes are nanoscale extracellular vesicles (EVs) released...
Novel therapeutic strategies are urgently needed to control the SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) pandemic. This virus belongs to a larger class of corona viruses currently circulating, which pose major threats to global public health. Here, I present the fabrication and characterization of Erythro-VLPs: Erythrocyte-Based Virus Like Particles, i.e., red blood cell...
As a result of the growing world-wide antibiotic resistance crisis, many currently existing antibiotics have been shown to be ineffective due to bacteria developing resistive mechanisms. There are a limited variety of potent antibiotics that are successful at suppressing microbial growth, such as polymyxin B, however, are deemed as a last resort due to their high toxicity. Adverse side effects...
During the Covid-19 pandemic, face masks have become the new norm with their widespread use in public as part of a multi-barrier approach for infection control, including physical distancing, hand hygiene, and altered social behaviour. Masks provide benefits to both the mask wearer and to those in their proximity when they are worn by all individuals in a common area. The gold standard in...
Social distancing measures have been the main non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) against the COVID-19 pandemic. Numerous large-scale analyses have studied how these measures have affected human movement, finding sizeable drops in average mobility. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to higher-order effects such as “superspreading events” which are known to be outsized drivers...
For a lot of us, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant dialing back, hunkering down, and holding off until things get back to normal. For some, though, it has meant ramping up and going the extra mile to get things back to normal. This presentation will attempt to tell a story that starts with a small group of students from Lakehead University and the Northern Ontario School of Medicine that...
