Hashmi Uses Spark Fund Award for Revolutionary Research
ChE Assistant Professor Sara Hashmi has received a second Spark Fund Award from the Center of Research Innovation at Northeastern. The goal of the award is to advance a technology or suite of technologies from academia towards commercialization.
Hashmi is advancing microfluidic tensiometry/elastometry technology, which promises to revolutionize the screening and optimization of elastic particles and fluid droplets. This technology is poised to impact single-cell genomics and antibody discovery by offering a high-throughput method for assessing material properties. Hashmi’s expertise in complex fluid dynamics and microfluidic device fabrication positions this project to capture a significant portion of the growing microfluidics market.
Optimizing Microfluidic Flow: with Spark Fund Awardee Sara Hashmi
Understanding the firmness or softness of cells provides valuable insights. Various stiffness markers in health and disease aid researchers and doctors in detecting diseases that have biomechanical markers.
For instance, metastatic cancer cells tend to soften when they become aggressive, while in diabetes, red blood cells stiffen when coated with sugar. This knowledge drives the use of droplet and microfluidic technology in disease detection.
That is why Assistant Professor Sara M. Hashmi and her team at The Hashmi Complex Fluids Lab study the flow of soft materials through small spaces. They investigate how phenomena like droplet deformation, particle softness, and polymer gelation affect fluids’ ability to travel through microchannels and other small pore spaces. They seek to improve the understanding of soft material flows across industries, ranging from biomedicine to environmentalism.
As part of this work, the team has developed a fluidic device aimed to aid in the design of disease assays and screening tools. This device holds promise for revolutionizing high-throughput analysis in microfluidic platforms used for genetic testing, drug discovery, and other applications. Real-time measurements of material properties during droplet and particle formation offer a significant advancement over traditional methods, which rely on post-production analysis or manual probing.
The team’s work in microfluidics has earned them selection as one of the Fall 2023 Spark Fund awardees.
Optimizing Droplet Technology to Transform Microfluidic Testing
With support from The Spark Fund, the lab is investigating the encapsulation of cells within droplets and the role of material softness in determining fluid flow dynamics. At the core of their efforts is a novel device designed to measure the shape and properties of soft particles traversing microchannels.
The fluidic device they’ve developed measures the shape of soft particles as they squeeze and deform through small spaces. As a result, any scientist using the fluidic droplet/particle maker can immediately learn the material properties of the droplets or particles they are generating. This in-situ, in-line technology will increase high-throughput efficiency in microfluidic platforms that encapsulate cells in droplets and particles like PCR tests.
Currently, standard practice involves analyzing individual droplets as separate test reactors, yielding high throughput but lacking the precision and efficiency of inline measurement. To optimize polymer particle softness, researchers manually poke each particle individually. Instead, the team is developing methods to test softness inline on a chip in the microfluidic device.
The goal of the lab’s research is to optimize the encapsulation process to produce the most stable droplets possible that are suitable for various applications. This optimization includes ensuring that polymer particles, formed from droplets, possess the appropriate softness to support cellular viability.
Commercialization with the CRI
The commercial application of the team’s technology is to help optimize the formulations that pharmaceutical companies and biomedical researchers use when trying to encapsulate cells or spheroids and then test each one individually in a very high-throughput way. The team aims to help optimize the formulation of how they make the materials used to test the cells.
In biomedical contexts, material softness’ impact on flow can indicate various disease states, from pre-diabetes to metastatic cancer. It is also important for popular flow tests like PCR tests, as biopolymers are used to encapsulate cells for genetic testing, drug discovery, and other applications. In PCR testing, this technology would help optimize the formulation that comes into the flow cytometer, optimizing tests for higher speed and throughput.
“Our immediate goal is to optimize formulations for biomedical and pharmaceutical testing,” says Hashmi. “We envision our workflow could speed up current processes by a factor of 10 or 100, or even more. A workflow that might take a week now, could take just an hour. That would be phenomenal.”