ME Seminar Series: Molecular Ultrasound Intervention Using Microbubbles

Ultrasound has a long history for medical applications with notable advantages including its non-invasiveness and superior safety profile. The robust interactions of ultrasound with gaseous microbubbles offer unique opportunities to develop novel strategies for an array of biomedical applications. In particular, techniques of ultrasound excitation and actuation of functionalized microbubbles that target to specific cellular receptors provide new and intriguing cellular access for biomedical ultrasound. In this presentation, I will discuss two approaches that exploit such interactions. The first is sonoporation, i.e., ultrasound induced transient disruption of cell membrane, which has the potential as an advantageous technique for non-viral gene transfection. The second is acoustic tweezing cytometry, a new technique we recently developed for applying spatiotemporally controlled subcellular forces to probe cellular mechanical properties and elicit desirable mechanoresponses with implications in areas such as stem cell differentiation.Event co-sponsored by the Duke Medical Imaging Training Program