Joel Goldman. I'm an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Been here for five years.
And in general we work on a mixture of microscale engineering applied to cell biology. Our research is focused in two main areas. One is in cell cytometry generally, which is doing things like making microscale platforms to sort cells.
A lot of it is based upon being able to sort after microscopy, so being able to image and then isolate different cells or being able to make prescribed arrays of cells in terms of cell type A along with cell type B, exposed to stimulus C, those types of of functionalities. And then the other half of the lab is focused on micro technologies for stem cell biology. And the main focus there is with embryonic stem cells and mostly looking at self-renewal.
And we do a few different things. We do, we do some microfluidic culture where we use perfusion of the liquid to try to get better control over the diffusible signaling. And we do patterning of colonies to be able to control colony colony interactions.
And then we do patterning of cells and that's where the bio flip chip comes in, which is a way of essentially transporting single cells and putting em into defined configurations. Studying em on the plate is, is a, is a fantastic approach and we've been able to do, to learn a whole lot about stem cell biology in the last 25 years by doing things on plate. So it's, it's a great approach and if it works, you should do it.
But there are some times when the added control of controlling down to the length scales of cells is important. And it's, it's not too hard to imagine when you think about how tightly regulated development is in vivo, that being able to control who the cells talk to, what the cells sit on, and what the cells are bathed in, in a time dependent fashion at the scale of cells is going to be important for tissue development. Morphogenesis, these types of events, it's nice if you're developing a therapy to really understand the fundamental biology of why something is happening.
And so a lot of our devices are meant at being able to unravel those fundamental questions of basic questions like why do cells, why do embryonic stem cells decide to self-renew? Self-renew versus differentiate. And then there's also the issue of if you're trying to scale up production, then you want to understand what factors are important in that scaling up.
And so for instance, that the bio flip chip, we're starting to ask the questions about what situation, how do you, how must you propagate the cells in order to maximize whatever you're interested in undifferentiated this plating efficiency, so on and so forth. So those types of issues. And then third related to that is, you know, the whole set of questions concerning why are mouse IC stem cells different than human IC stem cells?
How are they different? Is it a culture artifact? Is it fundamental?
These types of questions. I think in the next five to 10 years you'll actually start to see new therapies come about that are, that come from embryonic stem cells, which I think hasn't been shown yet. But you know, some of the work in terms of the reprogramming that's been coming out recently and some of the endpoints people are able to get to are very, very impressive.
So I think that while a few years ago I would've said it was 20 years away, now I think it's closer to five to 10.
