Title:  A Multimodality CMOS Cellular Interfacing Array for Holistic Cellular Characterization and Cell-based Drug Screening

Committee: 

Dr. Wang, Advisor       

Dr. Inan, Chair

Dr. Lam

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to develop multimodality CMOS sensor array for holistic cellular characterization and cell-based drug screening. Cells are the basic structural, functional, and biological units of all known living organisms. Understanding the physiological behaviors of living cells and tissues is a prerequisite to further advance bioscience and biotechnologies, such as synthetic biology, stem cell manufacturing, and regenerative medicine. Moreover, both wide-type and genetically modified cells have been widely used as powerful sensing and diagnostic tools in cell-based assays; these assays are the key enablers in numerous high-impact applications, including characterizing the potency, efficacy, and toxicity of new drugs in pre-clinical pharmaceutical development, determining the patient-specific treatments in personalized medicine, fast pathogen screening for epidemic disease detections, and detecting biohazards and pollutants in environmental monitoring. In this proposal, as a preliminary work, we develop a proof-of-concept CMOS multimodality sensor array platform to achieve simultaneous detections of multiple orthogonal cellular physiological responses, including impedance mapping, optical detection, extracellular potential recording, and cellular environment thermal monitoring. Next, we present a 1024-pixel multimodality joint sensor/stimulator array to precisely characterize the behaviors of the electrogenic cells such as cardiomyocytes and neurons under a variety of external stimuli (electrical, chemical, and drug). As a proposed work, we will improve the spatial resolution of multimodality cellular sensor array to the single-cell resolution regime with large-scaled parallel recordings. Moreover, aggressive pixel reduction will lead to degraded signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR), and we will develop low-noise circuit techniques and employ array-based tetrapolar impedance measurement to ensure high-quality cellular sensing.