Imperial College London

Professor Tony Cass

Faculty of Natural SciencesDepartment of Chemistry

Senior Research Investigator
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 5195t.cass

 
 
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Location

 

301KMolecular Sciences Research HubWhite City Campus

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Summary

 

Overview

Research in the group falls broadly into the area of bioanalysis with a particular focus in the following areas:

  • Biosensors: We are producing sensors based on both optical and electrochemical signal transduction schemes for applications in personal healthcare, bioreactor monitoring and clinical diagnostics. These biosensors often exploit engineered proteins.
  • Protein Engineering:  Although proteins have been widely used in bioanalysis many of their properties are not optimally suited to this application.  We are therefore using protein design tools to re-engineer the properties of proteins to better suit them to this application.
  • Microarrays and Microfluidics:  Microarrays offer the possibility of massively parallel analysis. We are working on arrays where the content is based on non-antibody binding proteins of either narrow or broad specificity. We are also exploring the use of pattern recognition methods to relate array signatures to the state of the system under analysis.
  • Proteomics: We are using both 'conventional' as well as nanomaterials based proteomics to understand how the changes occurring in the protein complements of biological systems relate to their behaviour.  In particular, we are interested in the proteomic profiles that develop during the growth of stem cells in controlled culture and during the interactions of cells with synthetic materials.