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The Medical Microsystems Lab develops diagnostic and therapeutic systems at the nano-and microscale with the aim to tackle a range of challenging problems in health care.
Explore cutting-edge biomedical engineering research in microrobotics for cell probing, drug delivery, and diagnostics.
The extracellular matrix (ECM) is an essential component of healthy tissue that provides structure and support. However, in maladies including cancer, it is now understood that the ECM can also play a harmful role in disease progression and that characteristics of the tumor micro-environment arise in part from mechanical interactions between malignant and non-transformed cells within the ECM.
Targeted cancer therapy has brought new clinical approaches to the forefront, including the use of antibodies, small molecules, anti-angiogenics, and antivirals. However, these strategies are limited by the challenges of tumor accumulation and penetration.
The field of personalized medicine is constantly evolving, and new diagnostic tools are needed to understand an individual patient’s disease state, inform clinical decision-making, and monitor therapeutic response. In previous work at MIT, we developed a nanosensor that can identify tumor-specific enzymatic activity profiles, such as from proteases, a crucial class of enzymes, through localized sampling of the tumor microenvironment.
Here’s what we’ve been up to recently.
