Designing diagnostic platforms for analysis of disease patterns and probing disease emergence

Abstract

The emerging era of personalized medicine relies on medical decisions, practices, and products being tailored to the individual patient. Point-of-care systems, at the heart of this model, play two important roles. First, they are required for identifying subjects for optimal therapies based on their genetic make-up and epigenetic profile. Second, they will be used for assessing the progression of such therapies. Central to this vision is designing systems that, with minimal user-intervention, can transduce complex signals from biosystems in complement with clinical information to inform medical decision within point-of-care settings. To reach our ultimate goal of developing point-of-care systems and realizing personalized medicine, we are taking a multistep systems-level approach towards understanding cellular processes and biomolecular profiles, to quantify disease states and external interventions.