Engineering Microrobots for Medicine: From tissue probing to biosensing to enhanced drug delivery

Monday, December 11, 2023

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Luria Auditorium, 76-156

Simone Schürle-Finke, PhD

ETH Zurich

Simone Schürle–Finke’s Responsive Biomedical Systems Lab develops diagnostic and therapeutic systems at the nano-and microscale with to tackle a range of challenging problems in health care, including the increasing cancer burden and infectious diseases. The research focus is twofold: The group develops tools to study disease mechanisms in vitro at the cellular level. We then use this knowledge to inform the design and fabrication of responsive nanosystems that help diagnose or treat diseases with minimal invasion. As such, these systems react for example to locally present signals of the disease environment, such as characteristic pH levels or enzymatic activity. For an additional level of control, simple on-board circuits are added to activate these systems through externally applied stimuli including heat, acoustic, mechanic or electromagnetic signals, resulting in a diagnostic or therapeutic output such as local, on demand release of drugs.