The majority of this week was spent internally processing a lot of the comments we have received from last week. Due to the demands of classes and a busy week schedule, we have not yet met as a group to discuss our future direction. We hope to meet either this weekend or at the beginning of the next week in order to discuss our thoughts and findings to determine directions we would like to explore. Each of us has taken this week to re-evaluate the project direction in order to provide meaningful comments for our next meeting that will determine what methods we try and how we want to proceed moving forward, whether that means revising our timeline or re-structuring how responsibilities are divided up thus far.
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Many events have transpired in the past week that have been critical in determining the direction of the project.
Our group thought that the feedback from Dr. Yin was especially informative. His immediate feedback motivated us to re-examine our guiding design parameters and spend additional attention on alternative technologies. However, we felt that because we did not thoroughly explain how our design timeline is different from other groups, a portion of our intent was misunderstood. After the preliminary presentation, we immediately scheduled a time to meet with Ali to thoroughly discuss Dr. Yin’s feedback and clarify our intent. Our meeting with Ali on the 14th was clarifying and useful. We will properly motivate eliminating preliminary designs by thoroughly explaining our thought process in the progress report. Because our design timeline will be focused more on testing and refinement, we will clarify differences in the next presentation as well. In addition to meeting with Ali, we met with Young earlier that day. We updated him on how we were proceeding. We was able to answer some questions we had about what solutes should first be used to evaluate diffusion through the chamber. Out of the standard markers mentioned in the grant, we will plan to begin with urea (“small” marker), albumin (“large” marker), Rhodamine B, and 3kDa dextran and evaluate them with the appropriate ELISA kits. We met with Nic Thompson on the 18th at the 3D printing suite to discuss channel design. We discussed the limitations of the sacrificial carbohydrate lattice we were planning to move forward with, which included the difficulty of creating a plastic mold that can resolve that small of a channel, retrieving the solidified glass rod from the mold without shattering, and the rod being able to maintain the stress from loading the PEG gel without bowing or breaking. After discussing these limitations, we began discussing alternatives. Instead of creating a sacrificial rod, we talked about using a syringe or needle to place in the chamber while the gel is loaded. Once the gel is loaded, the syringe or needle would be removed to create an open channel in the gel. A concern arose with shearing the gel during the removal process, which we thought could be remedied by coating the needle with some sort of lubricant. We also talked briefly about adjusting the chamber design. We will schedule a followup meeting with Nic after adjusting our approach and more thoroughly discuss changes in the chamber design in the next weekly progress report. In addition, we also have created our website: http://esyn.weebly.com/. We spent the majority of this week’s time devoted to the presentation and trying to finalize the details of it. I had put the presentation together prior to going to BMES, but finalized much of the details with my group on Sunday 10/9. Significant amounts of time were spent on rehearsing it and going over details to make sure that the presentation was good and something we were all comfortable showing to the rest of the class.
After the presentation, we decided to push off a lot of the emails we were planning on sending, along with our plans to move forward with the design and creation of molds in order to address a lot of the concerns that had been brought up during our preliminary presentation by Dr. Yin. We wanted to ensure that we had good metrics and a concrete idea of what we wanted to address moving forward. Thus, there was no significant progress made this week in terms of moving forward with the project. Instead, most of the time spent this week was devoted to thinking of the project, possibly restructuring it, and arranging meetings with people in order to address these problems. Our group is meeting with Ali later this afternoon to better understand the timeline, what is expected from our product, and how we could best move forward with the project that we have. We understand that our project is also a bit more unique in that we will require more time to test our product than other groups will. Thus, the original timeline we had proposed required for the test chamber to be put together by the beginning of second semester in order to leave enough time for us to test it as well. We are also meeting with our client later in the afternoon after our meeting with Ali to go over more specific metrics as well as provide a progress report. Good communication from both ends will ensure that they have a good understanding of where we are. Information discussed in these two meetings will be included in the following week's preliminary report. After finalizing these details, we hope to contact one of our collaborators who is an expert in 3D printing. From there, we can begin to design our testing chamber and try out various molds for use with the perfusable vasculature. This week our team continued to study and attempt on four major subjects: 1. Carbohydrate-glass lattice material proposed by Jordan S. Miller paper that was discussed in previous week's report 2. The E-SYN drug testing chamber design 3. Mathematical modeling of diffusion phenomena of typical drug particles in current design of E-SYN testing chamber 4. Preliminary report and the presentation for project.
Specifically, during the week Arnold mainly focused on putting together the preliminary report and the presentation. Arnold also planned out a timeline with our client associated graduate student Young regarding when our team will be able to complete molds for our E-SYN drug testing chamber. Arnold is also in the process of reaching out to Nick Thompson at Washington University School ofMedicine to go over our needs and see if we can get a preliminary design mold to test in the Setton lab, which is scheduled sometime next week. In addition to collective discussion of the preliminary design of the device that will serve as the platform of our test, Richard has been working on 3D design of E-SYN drug testing chamber in Autodesk Inventor software and technical drawing for illustration of current design. The corresponding files of the 3D models and technical drawings are uploaded to SciNote. Moreover, a preliminary mathematical diffusion model for current rectangular 3D E-SYN drug testing chamber was also attempted by Richard in COMSOL software. Most of our team's time this week was spent on preliminary report and the presentation preparation. Next week is planned to be more experimental and lab-focused. |
Group 38Archives
April 2017
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