Search Results - maria+santore

This invention provides economical, bio-interactive surfaces and surface treatment methods for selective capture of targeted epithelial cells or other cell types from cell mixtures or complex biological fluids. Preparation or fabrication of the engineered surfaces provided by this technology does not require the use of expensive and unstable biomolecular materials, and the resulting surfaces can distinguish different cell types or cells that express different levels of the same surface adhesion marker. Such engineered surfaces can be used as economical tools for assessment of cancer risk, cancer diagnosis, and tracking of the effectiveness of cancer treatments, among other potential applications.

This invention provides economical, renewable surfaces and related methods for selective capture of bacteria in a fluid medium and for killing and/or release of the captured bacteria. The fabrication of these surfaces or surface-treated substrate materials does not require the use of expensive biomolecules and toxic chemicals. The surfaces capture and kill bacteria on contact without leaching any toxic antimicrobial agents. The surfaces can rapidly release captured or killed bacteria via mechanical means, and thus are easily renewable for subsequent round of bacterial capture, killing and release, which makes them ideal for use in on-line bacterial sensor systems. In addition, the surfaces can be engineered to selectively capture bacteria from complex fluid media or selectively capture one bacterial strain over another.

This technology provides novel, engineered surfaces containing functionalized nanoparticle adhesive elements whose surface arrangements are optimized for highly selective adhesion, sensing and separation of biological or nonbiological analyte particles in a broad range of sizes, from submicron to tens of microns. The nanoparticle- textured surfaces are designed to exploit repulsive interactions between analyte particles and the main portion of the surface, in addition to attractions between the adhesive elements and the target particles. The competitive attractive and repulsive interactions produce tunable selective dynamic adhesion for analyte particles, discriminating targets on the basis of size, local curvature (roughness), net charge density, and arrangement of surface functional groups.