Keywords: Droplet Microfluidics, Colloidal Assembly, Microrobotics

We are looking for a motivated Master’s student to join an exciting interdisciplinary thesis project, collaborating between deMello group (D-CHAB) and Multi-Scale Robotics Lab (D-MAVT) at ETH Zurich. This project focuses on creating a novel microfluidic-based bottom-up method to fabricate multifunctional microrobots. This innovative approach seeks to revolutionize microrobot fabrication, opening the door to diverse new applications.

Background

Microrobots have immense potential in fields such as biomedicine and environmental remediation. However, their development has been hindered by limitations in integrating multiple functional components effectively. Current top-down fabrication methods, e.g. photolithography or 3D printing, struggle to combine diverse functional components, restricting the versatility and performance of microrobots.

To overcome these challenges, this project will develop a novel bottom-up microfluidic assembly method, enabling the creation of multifunctional microrobots with unprecedented precision and flexibility. This innovative approach has the potential to redefine microrobot fabrication and expand their applications significantly.

Ideal Skills and Experience (not mandatory)

· Experience or knowledge in microfluidic devices design and operation.

· Prior experience in chemistry lab.

Our project is highly interdisciplinary and embodies a high-impact, high-reward research approach. Your work could lead to pioneering discoveries and applications in microrobotics. If you are interested, please contact Chao Song (chao.song@chem.ethz.ch) and Dr. Minghan Hu (minghu@ethz.ch) for more details about the Master thesis.

Angiogenesis is essential for organ or tumor function, and in particular, the vascular network within the tumor plays an important role in disease progression and treatment resistance. However, replicating these vascular systems in lab-grown models has been a major limitation, especially when trying to scale up experiments for drug testing or genetic studies. To address this challenge, we established a microfluidic platform for tumor vascularization to analyze heterogeneous gene profiles in disease progression. In this project, you will have the opportunity to play with advanced microfluidic devices and explore colorful 3D culture techniques and beautiful genomic analysis.

Welcome to the project. It would be great if you could grasp the basics of tissue engineering, neurobiology, 3D bioprinting, and bioinformatics.

What? Digital diagnostics are a relatively new technology where tens of thousands of independent tests are done in tiny constrained areas and read as either a true or false and then interpreted together using Poisson statistics to infer disease markers like viral load. They are ultra-sensitive and have lower limits of detection than other technologies.

Why? Diagnosis is a key step in the treatment process, and improving diagnostic technology has shown outsized positive effects in personal health and population health (a lesson underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic). However, recent gains require robust infrastructure and thus have disproportionately benefited developed countries.

How? This project maximizes impact by focusing on the translation of digital diagnostic techniques to paper-based microfluidic substrates for use in resource-constrained locations. Specifically, the focus is on the protein micropatterning to make the individual “compartments” which are key to the digital analysis. The student will extend work which was already done with streptavidin patterning to other proteins, testing both the pattern stamping parameters as well as the capacity of the deposited proteins to be functionalized for the biological assay.

More details see here

In this work, we propose using a microfluidic probe (MFP) to quantify heterogeneity in tissue sections by periodic sampling and spatial mapping of the tissue section.

Tumors, as all biological organisms, provide a wide range of variability in their structure and expression. This variability manifests itself in the macro scale – the morphology itself, and also in the micro-scale – the difference in molecular expression. These molecular variations are expressed as inter-tumor and intra-tumor heterogeneities. Traditional gold standard technique of tumor analysis – immunohistochemistry (IHC) provided an elegant staining method but is limited by being an end-point assay and is used to provide one data point for the whole tissue. Averaging out all heterogeneity information in the entire tissue section leads to loss of important diagnostic information. A recently developed workflow, called GeneScape (Voithenberg et. al., Small, 2021), allows localized analysis while preserving spatial information.

We propose to extend the workflow to parallelize sample collection and subsequent analysis. Adapting sample collection techniques to existing workflows will further allow easy acceptance and adoption of the proposed technique in general practice. The application of spatial information in tumor heterogeneity will be in basic research and clinical use to adapt tumor therapy based on molecular heterogeneity.