Single-cell mass measurements for drug susceptibility testing in cancer

Measuring the size distributions of micron-scale particles is of central importance in the biological sciences and for a wide range of industrial processes. The suspended microchannel resonator (SMR) is a sensor that measures the mass of individual micron-scale particles by detecting a shift in resonance frequency as particles flow through a hollow resonating micro-cantilever beam. While SMRs offer extreme precision for measuring mass, their applications have been limited by low measurement throughput. In the first part of this thesis, I describe several technical advancements aimed at increasing the throughput of SMRs. First, we developed devices containing many SMRs connected fluidically in parallel on the same microfluidic chip. By operating many mass sensors simultaneously, these "parallel SMR arrays" achieve approximately 27-fold higher throughput than previously possible.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Stockslager, Max A.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Scott R. Manalis.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127059

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/127059