Moving Individual Cells Around Channels On Microfluidic Chips

Stanford biophysicist Stephen Quake invented microfluidic devices used for analyzing cells
Stephen Quake’s laboratory at Stanford University looks like biology’s Quake was named co-president of the BioHub, a new $600 million center funded by Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. BioHub has as its premier project helping to create a vast directory of human cells, which it calls a “cell atlas.” Quake and BioHub are also part a consortium of researchers around the globe who say mapping the millions of cells in the human body is a feat that could help drugmakers and scientists find new ways to treat disease.                              Individual cells can be studied by capturing them in micro-droplets, such as inside this microfluidic channel
Textbooks say there are about 300 types of cells in the human body, including the ones that carry oxygen in the blood, the long-lived neurons in the brain, and the photoreceptors in the eye that work like a digital camera.
But the real number is probably far larger perhaps 10,000, says Quake. It’s just that they can’t be distinguished under an ordinary microscope.
What scientists want to do now is to inspect tens of millions of human cells for their molecular signatures and also locate each type in the body.
That sort of map could be useful to scientists or drugmakers, who might, for instance, look up which cells a new drug is likely to effect. Cataloging how the immune system changes and adapts to fight tumors could be the source of the next insights for cancer treatments.
Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have said they plan to give away $3 billion over 10 years to fight disease, something that would make the couple the largest private funders of basic biology research after the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, says Marc Kastner, head of the Science Philanthropy Alliance and an adviser to the 32-year-old billionaire.
Zuckerberg is also set to become the biggest funder of the cell atlas technologies.
“BioHub is still very small scale compared to what is needed to make progress,” he says. “It’s going to take an international effort of huge magnitude.”
In fact, there is already a group called the International Human Cell Atlas Consortium, which is developing mapping strategies and hoping to get the National Institutes of Health and European funders like the Wellcome Trust interested.

Moving Individual Cells Around Channels On Microfluidic Chips

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