Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

Funding is requested for a fluorescence microscopy high-speed imaging set-up to perform analytics on microfluidic platforms for drug-discovery and patient-monitoring applications. The miniaturisation of chemical and biological systems using microfluidic technologies is a recent but exciting trend in the natural sciences. Dr Elvira's research program aims to develop high-throughput microfluidic platforms for health applications that bridge the gap between academic research and real-world application. There are two main research areas. The first is to develop in vitro biomimetic models that allow the prediction of the in vivo behaviour of drug candidates early on in the discovery process. This will enable pharmaceutical companies to focus on the most promising candidates and lower the costs of drug discovery. The second is to develop microfluidic hospital-based patient monitoring technologies, which will focus on close collaborations with domain specialists for the eventual commercialisation of these platforms. This will provide doctors with faster, cheaper and more accurate information on patient status. Dr Elvira will start her appointment as a new tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Victoria in January 2017. The equipment requested is essential for all elements of Dr Elvira's research program, as described in her NSERC Discovery Grant. The equipment requested is a microscopy set-up for online, high-throughput laser-induced fluorescence detection and analysis in microfluidic platforms. Microfluidic technologies allow highly controllable manipulation of fluids on the micron scale in extremely fast timeframes. This causes problems with analysis since the rate of detection must be on the scale of thousands per second, but also because the amount of analyte detected is extremely small since detection volumes are usually on the scale of femto- to picolitres. Fluorescence-based detection methodologies are widely used in microfluidics because they are highly-sensitive (single cell and single molecule detection) and quantitative. If the equipment requested is not available, Dr Elvira will be unable to perform the majority of the detection and analytics for her proposed research program. In addition, the lack of this equipment will limit the training of researchers in Dr Elvira's group and place them at a disadvantage compared to peers in other microfluidic laboratories.