Colloquium: Targeted Cancer Interrogation and Detection: Rallying the Forces of Nanotexture, Aptamers and Sequence Engineering
All dates for this event occur in the past.
Presented by:
May 5, 2015, Dreese Labs 260, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Abstract: Tumor cells exhibit very specific biophysical properties that can be used to distinguish them from the healthy cells. Cancer cells are softer, adherent and depict a very “active lifestyle” in contrast to their normal counterparts. The metastatic tumor cells also pass through hard layer of basement membrane. Solid-state materials with nanotextured features can mimic the basement membrane environment and provide mechanical strength to transduce cell’s properties into electrical signals. These mechanical properties can be used as inherent markers for tagless diagnosis of cancer cells. My lab has been working on designing nanotechnology-based approaches to engineer and functionalize microdevice surfaces that utilize cell-surface interactions for highly sensitive isolation and capture of tumor cells.
This talk will present a number of detection systems that utilize nanotexture, aptamers and nucleic acid sequence engineering, all directed to exploit inherent physical and chemical properties for the identification of cancer cells. The capability to sense and recognize the cells when they are very few in numbers in peripheral blood makes these approaches suitable for diagnosis of cancer at earlier stages. These diagnostic frameworks can be extended to other investigations as well where cell’s viscoelastic behavior can be used for diagnosis.
Biography Samir Iqbal, Ph.D., P.E. is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, USA. He has published many scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals. Some of his work has been published on the covers of scientific magazines. He has been invited around the world to give keynote speeches, plenary talks, seminars and workshops at conferences, meetings and symposia in the areas of nanotechnology, chip-based diagnostics and molecular electronics. He serves on a number of USA and international scientific grant review panels and is a regular reviewer for a number of engineering, medical and scientific journals. He has also edited a book and serves on the editorial board of three journals.
He earned his doctoral degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA and worked as a post-doctoral research associate at Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University before joining UT-Arlington. Dr. Iqbal is a senior member of Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers – USA (IEEE), and is a member of American Physical Society, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Biomedical Engineering Society, Biophysical Society, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, European Society for Nanomedicine, and Sigma Xi, to name a few. He was a recipient of US National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2009. In 2011, he was chosen as Recognized Professor by Phi Kappa Phi. In 2013, Tau Beta Pi inducted him as Eminent Engineer and UT-Arlington selected him for Honorable Mention for Best Academic Advisor Award. In 2014, the College of Engineering at UT-Arlington nominated him for President's Award for Excellence in Teaching. He was awarded Sigma Xi Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award in 2014. In November 2014, he was inducted into National Academy of Innovators by UT-Arlington. Earlier this year, he was given the Best Research Mentor Award at his university.