Browsing by Author "Ballas, Christopher B."

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    Massively-Parallelized, Deterministic Mechanoporation for Intracellular Delivery
    (American Chemical Society, 2020-02) Dixit, Harish G.; Starr, Renate; Dundon, Morgan L.; Pairs, Pranee I.; Yang, Xin; Zhang, Yanyan; Nampe, Daniel; Ballas, Christopher B.; Tsutsui, Hideaki; Forman, Stephen J.; Brown, Christine E.; Rao, Masaru P.; Medicine, School of Medicine
    Microfluidic intracellular delivery approaches based on plasma membrane poration have shown promise for addressing the limitations of conventional cellular engineering techniques in a wide range of applications in biology and medicine. However, the inherent stochasticity of the poration process in many of these approaches often results in a trade-off between delivery efficiency and cellular viability, thus potentially limiting their utility. Herein, we present a novel microfluidic device concept that mitigates this trade-off by providing opportunity for deterministic mechanoporation (DMP) of cells en masse. This is achieved by the impingement of each cell upon a single needle-like penetrator during aspiration-based capture, followed by diffusive influx of exogenous cargo through the resulting membrane pore, once the cells are released by reversal of flow. Massive parallelization enables high throughput operation, while single-site poration allows for delivery of small and large-molecule cargos in difficult-to-transfect cells with efficiencies and viabilities that exceed both conventional and emerging transfection techniques. As such, DMP shows promise for advancing cellular engineering practice in general and engineered cell product manufacturing in particular.
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    Towards ultrahigh throughput microinjection: MEMS-based massively-parallelized mechanoporation
    (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2012) Zhang, Yanyan; Ballas, Christopher B.; Rao, Masaru P.; Department of Medicine, IU School of Medicine
    We describe a massively-parallelized, MEMS-based device concept for passively delivering exogeneous molecules into living cells via mechanical membrane penetration, i.e., mechanoporation. Details regarding device design and fabrication are discussed, as are results from preliminary live cell studies focused on device validation at the proof-of-concept level. These efforts represent key steps towards our long-term goal of developing instrumentation capable of ultrahigh throughput (UHT) cellular manipulation via active microinjection.