Our lab develops nanoparticles as tools to study biological barriers and to overcome these barriers at mucosal surfaces to improve drug delivery and immunotherapy. One of the most notable developments is the COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna that use lipid nanoparticle formulations to deliver mRNA for vaccination. There are a lot of ongoing efforts to improve immunotherapies like vaccines and cancer treatments using nanoparticles, as these formulations could improve target delivery to immune cells and reduce the systemic side effects of immunotherapies.

Single cell analysis is an essential component of immunology in biomedical research, one of the most common techniques being flow cytometry. Performing such cell isolations from tissues of interest requires reliable tissue dissociation. Making laboratory research more accessible without compromising quality and accuracy can be challenging.

Automating processes makes technical and labor intensive steps easier to learn and allows trainees to gain experience doing more sophisticated analyses without affecting the reliability of results. The main advantage of this protocol and the accompanying device design is its customizability and cost effectiveness. The ability to process up to 12 tissues simultaneously reduces processing times.

This low cost alternative makes this technology more accessible in lower resourced research settings.