A two-year collaboration between the Chan and the Rocheleau labs at the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) has led to the development of a new microfluidics screening platform that can accurately predict the way nanoparticles will behave in a living body. Nanoparticles are being eyed by scientists as a potentially powerful tool for personalized cancer treatments. The tiny particles, ranging in size from 10 to 100 nanometres (somewhere in size between a large protein to a small virus), can be deployed to outline tumours or to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to cancer cells with more potency and less side effects than regular delivery methods. But Associate Professor Jonathan Rocheleau, core faculty at the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME), cross-appointed to the Departments of Physiology and Medicine, Division of Endocrinology & Metabolism and a corresponding author of the study released in Nature Communications last week, explained that the new platform fills some of the glaring holes in current nanotechnology research. Often, the surfaces of these tiny particles are treated to make them stick to certain cells, an effect which tends to work very well when studying the particles in petri dish cultures. “What we showed was that the nanoparticles meet up with a

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