Open Seminar: 'Building customisable artificial cells on a chip for drug discovery and other applications'

Dr Katherine Elvira is a Bristol Next Generation Visiting Researcher from the University of Victoria, Canada.

The cell membrane plays a crucial role in choreographing interactions between a cell and the outside environment. Here I will describe how we build bespoke human-mimetic artificial cell membranes, using both microfluidic and non-microfluidic methods, and how they can be used to help explain a variety of biological mechanisms. We have used these artificial cells to mimic how an orally administered drug moves from the intestine into an intestinal cell, and then from the cell into the blood stream, and to mimic how the cell membrane changes during cancer. I will also show how artificial cell membranes can be built to mimic the cell membrane composition found in male and female cells, and how this creates a clear difference in the permeability of the cell membrane. More broadly, I will briefly describe our work on micro-brewedics, where we put beer on a chip to investigate the stabilisation of hop oils in IPAs in collaboration with a local microbrewery.

This seminar is open to all across the University.

Dr Elvira's web profile page