Monitoring Dynamic Interactions of Tumor Cells with Tissue and Immune Cells in a Lab-on-a-Chip
About the Speaker
In 1997 Dr. Ertl entered a Ph.D. program in Chemistry at the University of Waterloo focusing on biosensor and bioassay development for the rapid identification of microorganisms. Following the completion of his Ph.D. in 2001, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley (CA, US) developing capillary electrophoresis chips (CE) for DNA analysis and fragment sizing. In 2003, he co-founded RapidLabs Inc. where he worked as Director of Product Development until 2005. He then joined the Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna Austria where his research involves the development of lab-on-a-chip systems for biomedical applications. In 2011 he was appointed Adj. Assoc. Prof. (habilitation) in the field of Nanobiotechnology. AbstractA complementary cell analysis method has been developed to assess the dynamic interactions of tumor cells with resident tissue and immune cells using optical light scattering and impedance spectroscopy to shed light on tumor cell behavior. The combination of electroanalytical and optical biosensing technologies integrated in a lab-on-a-chip allows for continuous, label-free and non-invasive probing of dynamic cell-to-cell interactions between adherent and non-adherent co-cultures, thus providing real-time insights into tumor cell responses under physiologically relevant conditions. While the study of adherent co-cultures is important for the understanding and suppression of tumor invasion, the analysis of tumor cell interactions with non-adherent immune cells plays a vital role in cancer immunotherapy research. For the first time the direct cell-to-cell interactions of tumor cells with bead-activated primary T cells were continuously assessed using an effector cell to target cell ratio of 10:1.
