Speaker
Details
Please join us for a special seminar from Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute and the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.
Light refreshments to be served before the seminar.
Abstract
Recent discoveries across immunology and cell biology have revealed that force plays a critical role in molecular recognition and signaling processes. Therefore, understanding and engineering these systems requires new tools capable of quantifying force-dependent effects and assessing the impacts of force. In this seminar, I will discuss the development and outcomes of two platforms designed to accomplish this. The first is a low-throughput but high-accuracy optical-trap-based platform applied to understand how T cells utilize mechanical forces to precisely discriminate sparse antigens from similar but abundant self-motifs. Using this platform, I discovered that T cells recognize pathogens and cancers via nonequilibrium mechanosensing rather than equilibrium binding, providing significant implications for T-cell-based immunotherapies and a paradigm shift relative to earlier recognition models. The second is a novel multiplexed microfluidic platform that enables parallel mapping of the sequence- and force-dependent landscape of T-cell activation for over 1,000 cells within hours, with promising applications towards high-throughput mechanobiology and T-cell-based immunotherapies. In my independent research, I plan to develop a suite of multiplexed and accessible microfluidics to comprehensively quantitate molecular and cell-cell interactions from equilibrium to nonequilibrium, transforming immunoengineering and broad bioengineering through quantitative reasoning to revolutionize how we improve health and treat disease.
- Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute
- Chemical and Biological Engineering