DRI Health grant for Virgilio Valente

Virgilio (Vivo) Valente received a Health Prototype Grant of €10K from the Delft Health Initiative for his proposal in the domains of Lab-on-CMOS and Organs-on-a-Chip.

The TU Delft Health Initiative objective is to promote research in the field of healthcare at Delft University of Technology and they granted 13 out of total 26 applications.

‘Organs-on-chip (OoC) systems represent the new frontier in biomedical engineering, aiming at re-producing and mimicking key aspects of living organs on microengineered biosystems, by modeling the structural and functional complexity of organs, tissue to tissue interactions and cellular metabolism. Coupled to microfluidics and multi-parameter sensing, OoCs promise a significant revolution in the development of future targeted drugs and therapies, by providing a vital alternative to conven-tional cell cultures and animal models. By leveraging the distinctive features of modern complemen-tary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, coupled with high-density microelectrode array (MEA) systems, we can develop complex yet com-pact microelectronic biodevices capable of interact-ing with biological networks at a single-cell scale with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity. Im-pedance-based measurements (IM) have shown significant potential in monitoring cell and tissue contractions, morphology and cell-to-cell heteroge-neity. Impedance assays are currently routinely developed to assess drug toxicity in cardiac cell cul-tures. Commercial systems, including the xCELLI-gence RCTA by ACEA Biosystems, are based on the use of two electrodes for IM, which greatly limits the measurement resolution. To date, there is no com-mercial or research system capable of measuring impedance profiles from cardiac cell culture with high resolution.’