Expanding the toolbox for precision medicine with silicon photonic microring resonators and microfluidic technologies
type: CreativeWork
description: The goal of precision medicine is to use molecular profiles of disease to identify a targeted treatment that results in the best available patient outcomes. Although the concept of individualizing treatment is not new to medicine, genomic technologies and therapies targeted to genetic drivers of disease have inspired an era of precision medicine. Obtaining molecular profiles of disease requires analyzing biological samples that present daunting analytical challenges with thousands of potentially interfering analytes, often at concentrations much higher than the analytes of interest. Many analytes harbor fragile chemical modifications, such as phosphorylation of signaling proteins, and therefore, require careful design of protocols for sample handling to preserve the relevant biological information. Classifying patients into subgroups that will benefit from tailored therapies demands moving beyond single biomarker diagnostics to multiplexed detection methods. The analytical toolbox for studying the molecular basis of human disease has grown tremendously in recent decades and has been motivated in part by the human genome project, with the most dramatic changes seen in sequencing technologies. The next frontier for molecular diagnostics is the development of diagnostic tools for non-genomic molecular profiles of disease, such as non-coding RNAs and proteins. This thesis details efforts to improve multiplexed protein detection for precision medicine diagnostics. Most of the following work uses microring resonator arrays as the detection platform, a versatile silicon photonic biosensing technology. Chapter 1 reviews the applications of optical resonators in analytical chemistry. Microring resonators arrays are a class of whispering gallery mode resonators featured throughout the review. A conventional focus of optical resonator development has been on designing label-free sensors for biomolecule detection. However, much of the recent work pushing limits of detection for…
abstract: The goal of precision medicine is to use molecular profiles of disease to identify a targeted treatment that results in the best available patient outcomes. Although the concept of individualizing treatment is not new to medicine, genomic technologies and therapies targeted to genetic drivers of disease have inspired an era of precision medicine. Obtaining molecular profiles of disease requires analyzing biological samples that present daunting analytical challenges with thousands of potentially interfering analytes, often at concentrations much higher than the analytes of interest. Many analytes harbor fragile chemical modifications, such as phosphorylation of signaling proteins, and therefore, require careful design of protocols for sample handling to preserve the relevant biological information. Classifying patients into subgroups that will benefit from tailored therapies demands moving beyond single biomarker diagnostics to multiplexed detection methods. The analytical toolbox for studying the molecular basis of human disease has grown tremendously in recent decades and has been motivated in part by the human genome project, with the most dramatic changes seen in sequencing technologies. The next frontier for molecular diagnostics is the development of diagnostic tools for non-genomic molecular profiles of disease, such as non-coding RNAs and proteins. This thesis details efforts to improve multiplexed protein detection for precision medicine diagnostics. Most of the following work uses microring resonator arrays as the detection platform, a versatile silicon photonic biosensing technology. Chapter 1 reviews the applications of optical resonators in analytical chemistry. Microring resonators arrays are a class of whispering gallery mode resonators featured throughout the review. A conventional focus of optical resonator development has been on designing label-free sensors for biomolecule detection. However, much of the recent work pushing limits of detection for…
author: Wade, James Hamilton
language: en
keywords: Biosensor, Precision medicine, Silicon photonics, Microfluidics, Nanodiscs
date published: 2017-08-10T19:52:09Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:34Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/97594