Excited to share our new @ScienceAdvances paper on a tool that enables micro-invasive liquid biopsies of the brain! Interdisciplinary collab: #LangerLab @CimaLabMIT #WhiteLab @KochInstitute + #GraybielLab @mcgovernmit @MIT, co-first w/ @EB_Rousseau (1/9) https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/39/eabb0657

Why you should care: Neurological diseases are characterized by electrical & chemical dysregulation in the brain. Existing tools cannot monitor large rare chemicals, like proteins or peptides, meaning we cannot fully map how neurons communicate in healthy & diseased states (2/9)

The gap: Neurochemical sampling tools generally use large probes (>150μm diam) that limit spatial resolution & result in scarring. These probes collect samples via diffusion across membranes & nonspecific absorption of proteins/peptides to membranes leads to extraction loss (3/9)

Our solution: a membrane-free micro-invasive probe (80μm diam) coupled to a novel nanofluidic peristaltic pump. The pump is actuated by nitinol wires & has a small dead volume (<30 nL) so it can extract smaller fluid volumes than other low-flow pumps (4/9) http://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/nanofluidic-peristaltic-pump

Results: We can safely & repeatably sample interstitial fluid from rodent brains & analyze samples w/mass spec. We observed ~100 proteins in a single sample! Head-to-head in vitro comparisons of our platform vs existing tools show superior performance for large molecules (5/9)

Impact: This platform could be used to find & track new biomarkers of neurological disease as targets for novel therapies. We hope our tool provides deeper insight into the onset & mechanism of diverse debilitating diseases and leads to precision diagnostics + therapy (6/9)

Team: This paper was a huge multidisciplinary effort that required engineers/neuroscientists/materials scientists to collab for years - so grateful to my co-first author @EB_Rousseau, our mentors, & high-school, undergraduate, graduate students & technicians on our team! (7/9)

Funding: This work wouldn't have been possible without funding from @NIH @NIBIBgov, & we are so excited to continue this work powered by our new #R01! (8/9)

https://www.nibib.nih.gov/node/115841 

Future: If you have any questions/comments/ideas about our paper (open access link below) or our technology (patent application link below) - please reach out! (9/9)

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/6/39/eabb0657.full.pdf

http://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/nanofluidic-peristaltic-pump

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190344057A1/en?oq=WO+2019-222187