Grant: Emerging Team Grant: Regenerative Medicine and Nanomedicine - LOI

The effect of concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained.( Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds). This team aims to invent and develop new tools to answer questions researchers in life science cannot answer or have never even dreamt of asking. A fundamental goal in biological and health related research is understanding and quantifying phenomenological (phenotypic) and genetic diversity within cellular populations. Groups of cells can respond temporally to global changes in the environment and spatially in response to chemical gradients, specific inter-cellular interactions and other factors that influence the local micro habitat. The selective pressure resulting from these varying temporal and spatial conditions leads to evolution and resulting genetic diversity. Systems exhibiting such temporal, spatial and genetic heterogeneity include bacterial biofilms, muscle cells, neurons and tumors evolving in response to exposure with a drug or to colonize/invade surrounding regions/tissue. The modular tools we propose to develop in close synergetic interaction between physicists and biomedical researchers are essentially a multiplexed system of very sensitive nano sensors integrated to a nano nozzle attached to a sensitive force transducer based on a modified atomic force microscope (AFM). The AFM with its nano nozzle will be used to puncture a cell membrane and/or address cellular structures with nm spatial and pN force control and then either deliver macromolecular cargo to the cell (e.g. drugs, DNA, RNA, proteins, viruses) or extract cellular contents into the nano sensor network.