Punchcard Chemistry ~ Prakash's Cheap Fluidikit

Media Lab alum, now Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash (of FoldScope fame) and team win the Science Play and Research Kit Competition (SPARK) for their ultra-affordable punchcard-programmable chemistry fluidic kits! Thanks to Medgadget for spotting!

John Mills ~ Materials Biology, FluidicMEMS, plus

Great to have MIT alumnus John Mills join me on MaximizingProgress.tv tonight. After undergrad studies at Cornell in more classic materials science, he came to MIT and ended up at the cutting edge of materials and biology using -- and even co-developing -- the latest tools for understanding the mechano-physical properties of red blood cells. This work has tremendous bearing on understanding the impact of Malaria in humans. This relevance to a tropical ailment was one major driver towards John's subsequent collaborations in Singapore, the equatorial city-state with strong MIT research ties. His interest in cross-disciplinary activities had at least one other compelling consequence, namely his major commitment to running informal social gatherings to connect folks. These include the WeeklyWednesdays at MIT's Muddy Charles Pub and the leaders-oriented Acoustic BBQ and most recently the FluidicMEMS gatherings. Excellent contributions, all of them!

Microneedles ~ Fast, Painless Drug Delivery

Great to see the latest use of microneedles for vaccine delivery done by researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University and reported in Sunday's edition of Nature Medicine according to PhysOrg...

"In this study, we have shown that a dissolving microneedle patch can vaccinate against influenza at least as well, and probably better than, a traditional hypodermic needle," said Mark Prausnitz, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Just 650 microns in length and assembled into an array of 100 needles for the mouse study, the dissolving microneedles penetrate the outer layers of skin. Beyond their other advantages, the dissolving microneedles appear to provide improved immunity to influenza when compared to vaccination with hypodermic needles."

In addition to this initial use for flu vaccines, this method has many compelling potential applications for other diagnostic and therapeutic pharmaceuticals.

Invivomics ~ MIT Professor Yanik's Lab-on-Chip

Excellent to have MIT Professor Mehmet Fatih Yanik at our FluidicMEMS event last night at Microsoft NERD to share with us some of his groups work on high-throughput screening of small animals in vivo, first C. elegans and more recently Zebrafish! More generally, Yanik is interested in...

"Technologies for regenerative neurobiology. Neural regeneration and complex wiring of neuronal networks are probed and manipulated using various technologies including microfluidics, femtosecond laser microsurgery, and 3D multi-photon imaging. Development of novel drug and genetic screening and discovery platforms. Both animal and cell culture models employed ranging from C. elegans to embryonic-stem-cell derived neurons."

Very compelling! We're witnessing the beginnings of invivomics!

Stata @ Commencement ~ Great Alum Innovator

Fantastic to see that MIT alumnus entrepreneur Ray Stata has been tapped as Commencement Speaker 2010! Not only have I known Ray for nearly my entire time at the Institute, but I've heard him speak several times on different invigorating subjects and have been deeply impressed with his thoughtfulness, insights, and passion for innovation and entrepreneurship -- and MIT! One of my favorite Stata-stories is that of the MEMS accelerometers which are today everywhere. But when this was a merely expensive dream, few people bought in. Ray persevered and together with colleagues at Analog Devices created not only a product line of automobile crash-detectors which trigger airbags, but an entire family of devices, including the ADXL330 accelerometer which enables the Wii Remote videogame controllers and which "mobilize" several smartphones!

ClarosDx @ FluidicMEMS ~ 1st Innovation Soiree!

It was great to see the mixing tonight between ~50 members of our Boston-metro FluidicMEMS community -- i.e. academics, entrepreneurs, research scientists, business development folks, and more. We were generously hosted tonight by Microsoft NERD and financially supported by MIT EE Professor-Emeritus Stephen Senturia and his portable spectroscopy venture Polychromix. In addition to compelling connections, we were fortunate to have Claros Diagnostics founders, COO David Steinmiller and CTO Dr Vincent Linder, share their experience with commercializing their microfluidic quantitative immunoassay blood tests from both business and engineering perspectives.

MEMS Accelerometers ~ Surprising Market Shifts

Nice little info nugget from iSuppli that Nintendo Surpasses Samsung as Top Consumer and Wireless MEMS Buyer...

"Although Nintendo had been the No.-2 buyer of MEMS in consumer electronics during 2007 and 2008, the company in 2009 increased its purchase of gyroscopes -- a MEMS sensor for measuring or maintaining orientation -- for use in the Wii Motion Plus plug-in" [...] Dropping to second place after a two-year run at the top was Samsung. "From 2005 to 2007, Digital Light Processing (DLP) chips for rear-projection televisions accounted for most of Samsung’s MEMS consumption," Bouchaud said. "However, with Samsung exiting the DLP market, its overall consumption of MEMS in 2009 declined [...] Nonetheless, Samsung remains a high-volume purchaser of BAW filters for duplexers and quintplexers, and the company was also the top buyer of MEMS microphones last year."