PLEASE NOTE: This seminar is a hybrid event taking place in-person and online. You can choose to order an in-person ticket or a virtual attendance ticket when registering to attend.
For those attending in person, refreshments will be served immediately after this seminar in RSM 3.24 (Staff Common Room).
Title:
Instrumenting Organs on a Chip with Electrochemistry
Abstract:
Replacing animal testing in toxicology assays with integrated organs on a chip is a significant goal of the Human Microphysiological Systems initiative. In order to readout physiological changes in these organs in real-time, we have built a multianalyte microphysiometer that detects multiple analytes involved in the cellular bioenergetics simultaneously. Metabolic processes such as glycolysis, mitochondrial ATP generation, and glycogenesis are all directly related to the flux of these analytes. Temporal resolution of metabolic responses is much faster than conventional well-plate studies, leading to dynamic metabolic data. By combining all of the information in the multianalyte “biosignature” we can observe the metabolic pathway shifting from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism, the depletion of internal energy stores, and the dynamic decoupling of metabolic parameters. The adaption of this technology to instrumenting organs-on-a-chip is currently underway.
Current organ on a chip platforms being instrumented include the neurovascular “brain”, liver, and the fetal membrane. The toxicological applications of these organ systems are neurotoxicity and stroke modeling in the brain, hepatic toxicity in the liver, and chemical toxicity and bacterial infections in the developing fetal membrane.
Biography:
David E. Cliffel, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair and Professor of Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, Vanderbilt University, directs an innovative research effort in instrumental design and electroanalytical methods applied to nanotechnology and biotechnology. He is the deputy director in the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education (VIIBRE), and the Technical Editor for Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry, Electrocatalysis and Photoelectrochemistry for the Journal of the Electrochemical Society since 2016.
He was a member of the Board of Directors for the Society of Electroanalytical Chemistry from 2011-2016, and has been the treasurer ever since. He was the chair of the Department of Chemistry at Vanderbilt from 2016-2019 and is currently the Director of Graduate Studies for the department. He received his PhD in analytical chemistry under the direction of Allen J. Bard in 1998, was a post-doctoral assistant with Royce W. Murray at UNC-Chapel Hill, and joined Vanderbilt University in September 2000.