2021 ANNUAL REPORT | Bar-Ilan Institute of Nanotechnology & Advanced Materials

Recent advances in biotechnology have increased medical care options. Today, for example, there are any number of potential drug treatments for almost any type of cancer. Unfortunately, oncologists have no way of predicting which one a patient will respond to or whether the patient will respond at all. The only evaluation method at our disposal is growing each patient’s cancer sample in mice and testing how it responds to each drug. “This process takes months, and meanwhile the patient’s tumor changes, the tumor also changes in the mouse, and the results lose their validity. Moreover, in many cases, the patients don’t have time to wait,” says Prof. Doron Gerber, who aims to harness his 4×5×1-cm microfluidic chip to help oncologists save many lives. This Lab on a Chip, as its name suggests, packs an entire laboratory—including researchers and students, along with their pipettes, test tubes, and other experimental and analytical paraphernalia—onto a Lab on a Chip miniature silicon chip with multiple hair-sized tunnels and control switches, or “doors,” that pneumatically direct the liquids and biological materials to designated tunnels. “It allows us to reduce the volume of liquids and precious human samples routinely needed to perform a standard laboratory experiment from milliliters down to microliters—millionths of a liter—to nanoliters and even to picoliters—a millionth of a milliliter—while increasing analytical precision, thanks to the sophisticated optical components and automation mechanisms incorporated into our system.” Prof. Gerber and collaborators Amir Onn, MD, head of the Institute of Pulmonary Oncology at Sheba Medical Center, and Prof. Limor Broday of Tel Aviv University have demonstrated that the microfluidic chip could potentially predict an individual response in just a matter of days. “We received 10 lung cancer patients’ cell samples from our clinical partners, knowing nothing about Bioconvergence Accelerating Medical and Life-altering Innovation 43

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