Device design is proceeding well. Last Friday, Arnold spent some time in the lab assessing the viscosity of carbohydrate glass, composed of glucose, sucrose, and dextran, at high temperatures. We noted that the composite was viscous at 70C, the maximum printing temperature of the BioBots printer we were looking to use.
On Wednesday (9/28), Dr. Setton, Young, Arnold, and I met with Dominic Thompson, a staff scientist who manages the biomaterials/3D printing suite in the CSRB. We discussed different materials, including HIPS, PVA, and carbohydrate glass. He recommended that we create ABS molds for the carbohydrate glass channel instead of using the viscous carbohydrate composite as a printing material. Using reusable molds would allow us to construct the channel in-house (at the Setton Lab) rather than having to transport material back and forth between Danforth and CWE. In addition, we were informed that the resolution of the printer was suitable for our purposes (printing channels with diameters of 500 um to 1000 um, lower limit of 200 um). We will be following up with Mr. Thompson to schedule a design session to help us model the mold in CAD/Inventor. Overall chamber design is still in preliminary stages. Our first mockup will consist of a rudimentary rectangular design, similar to the old design but adapted to accommodate the new materials being used. A 3D printing file will be drafted by the next weekly report.
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From our meeting on last Friday with Young, a graduate student from our client Setton lab, we gained deeper and more significant insight of the project and where our design shall be positioned in the larger scheme of the entire grant funded project. It was very important for us to see the orientation and unique approach of the actual scientific research at the scope of administrator, which is indeed a very different perspective than what all of our team members have previously experienced as student research assistant.
Besides drawing and learning information from literature we were given by client as referred in our previous week’s report, we also continued to search for additional key techniques for the problem we are facing in the project. After relentless self-educating and discussion on specific aims of the design project, our team have completed the Scope of the project which has been submitted to Dr. Yin. The process though which we obtained most knowledge of the field of osteoarthritis (OA) and current drug delivery system was writing the Scope, trying to summarize significance of client’s need. In addition to collective discussion of the preliminary design of the device that will serve as the platform of our test, we have divided early stage work into three divisions for three team members—Arnold will primarily focus on the material fabrication process, David will concentrate his time on idea examination of novel designs of vessel device, and Richard shall spend time in charging of the dynamic diffusion modeling of the preliminary design in geometry and mathematics. This Friday afternoon at 1pm, we will meet with our client associate Young again for a tour in our client Setton Lab for familiarization of currently standing research facility and techniques. The update from the tour shall be included in next week’s weekly report due to deadline requirements. This week we were given reading to do in order to learn the necessary background knowledge for this project. This reading involved a grant submitted by the PI, Dr. Setton, a review article on Intra-articular drug delivery systems (Burt, 2009), a textbook chapter titled Synovial Fluid and Trans-synovial Flow in Stationary and Moving Normal Joints, and a Nature materials publication on the casting of vascular networks by Dr. Chris Chen's lab at Boston University. These papers were very interesting and provided a lot of insight into what made this drug delivery model so complicated. Further, the paper from Dr. Chen's lab provided a lot of ideas on how to better create the system we wanted to model.
After reading these papers, we met with Young, a graduate student in the Setton lab. Dr. Setton was out of town and thus, unavailable to meet this week although she will be there for future meetings. There, we discussed a lot of ideas for how we thought it best to tackle the problem. A few key points we all seemed to agree on was that the model should be a closed system with one part. Further, we decided to give Dr. Chen's method of creating a carbohydrate glass material a try in order to completely replace the gel and embed collection tubules directly into the model design. After drawing these conclusions, we established a timeline that works well for all team members. By the October deadline, we plan to have come up with a broad idea of how we want the model to look and what main features we want to include in it. We also established that within the next week we wanted to start looking into creating the carbohydrate glass material that will serve as part of our gel. We received a contact, Dominic Thompson) at the WashU medical school, who had helped Dr. Setton previously with 3D printing. We plan to reach out to him next week in order to discuss our plans further and see what capabilities his facilities can offer us. Richard, David, and I have also decided to meet this weekend in order to further discuss the project. We will also be meeting again with our cient next Friday to tour the lab space and discuss more experimental details. Our group met with Dr. Lori Setton and PhD candidate Young Guang last Thursday morning (9/8) to discuss “E-SYN”, a model bioengineered synovium. Prototypes were developed by undergraduate researchers over the summer. The design team would be involved in redesigning a test chamber to evaluate drug transport and bioactivity in cell-laden hydrogels. A major goal of the project would be improving compatibility between the test chamber and the hydrogel. This involves downsizing the current design and selecting appropriate materials to assure optimal fluidics, biocompatibility for drug clearance, and overall biomimicry.
We followed up with Dr. Setton and Young later that day, expressing our interest in the Setton Lab and E-SYN. We will be meeting with Young on 9/16 to clarify project goals. |
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April 2017
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