Optofluidic Devices for Cell Screening Purposes

Dear Colleagues,

In the last years, part of the scientific community has been moving towards the development of innovative devices for cell screening purposes that allow unprecedented resolution and the simplification of screening protocols. The detection of traces of biological species from biological samples is of extreme importance due to the possible impact on human health. However, a great number of issues come into play before a biological sample may be used as part of a routine screening procedure. The handling and analysis of complex biological samples that require individuating a single component among a cluster of molecules is challenging and conventionally requires complicate protocols to pretreat complex samples. Screening is often translated into the detection of few molecules in diluted solutions, which are invisible to the current sensors due to the limited analysis resolution. Moreover, for some screening procedures, it is important to not affect the phenotype of the biological sample, especially for the analysis over a long period of a specific sample (e.g. a specific cell populations). It thus becomes important to introduce new methodologies that are not invasive with respect to the analytes. Finally, the heterogeneity of the behavior of the human body and its response to medical treatments requires the development of tools that are compatible with personalized medicine, and this is translated to the development of devices that are portable, fast, and that provide parallel high-throughput and high content analysis with reduced costs. These devices can then become important for scientific research and clinical diagnostic applications, and the sequential handling and manipulation of cells and cell suspensions.

Ways to overcome these issues could be:

1. a) The development of microfluidic devices integrating optical sensors. Microfluidics is an interdisciplinary discipline that focuses on the transport, manipulation and analysis of small amount of liquids, cells and particles. These devices guarantee high portability, accurate control when handling samples, simplified sample pretreatment protocols, and low consumption of samples and reagents.
2. b) Sensing approaches that allow the monitoring of cells over a long period, in a label-free manner that does not affect the cell phenotype and metabolism, in order to discover new biomarkers and unknown as well as known molecules, resolve complex mixtures, and reduce sample pretreatments, in addition to enabling high resolution analysis.

This Special Issue will focus on these two aspects.

Prof. Dr. Gerardo Perozziello
Prof. Dr. Patrizio Candeloro
Dr. Maria Laura Coluccio
Assoc. Prof. Ulrich Kruhne
Guest Editors

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• microfluidics
• optical sensors
• cell screening
• microbioreactors
• lab on a chip
• optofluidics
• plasmonics
• nanodevices