Development of a piezoelectric microsystem for biomimetic heart on a chip and an aptamer-based gel electrophoresis chip for molecular detection

Despite the advances in medical diseases today, drugs screening is still a time-consuming and lengthy process. In order to enhance the efficiency of drug screening for cardiotoxin detection, developing a biomimetic heart on a chip based on piezoelectricity is the major goal of this study. The advantage of using piezoelectric material is its electro-mechanical coupling effect that can provide a real-time signal for monitoring cardiac activities. Furthermore, having an automatic in vitro biomimetic heart on chip system could potentially enhance the drugs screening process during the drug development. In this study, a piezoelectric polymer (PVDF or P(VDF-TrFE)) is used to serve as the flexible structure of the chip. To fit the culture of a single or several myocardial cells, a low cost microfabrication process of a piezoelectric thin-film was developed in this study. Developed process and experimental results will be presented in this thesis. On the other hand, a new methods based-on Aptamer for molecules detection is developed in this srudy. It provides excellent specificity for a large populations of molecules. Further, the production of aptamer is low-cost and stable. Researches have shown that aptamer is a good candidate for future molecular detection methods. In this study, we apply electrophoretic mobility electrophoresis analysis (EMSA) to demonstrate the feasibility of using aptamer for molecular detection. A miniature electrophoresis device was developed for verification of this concept. The real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) is used to analyze the quantity of detected molecules. It was confirmed that using aptamer to detect molecular is feasible and could potentially provide quantified information.