QUANTITATIVE BIOFLUID ENZYME ACTIVITY ASSAY AND SINGLE CELL ANALYSIS FOR PRECISION MEDICINE VIA INTEGRATED MICROFLUIDICS

Abstract

In the context of precision medicine, the capability of diagnostic and screening tools to obtain large amount of personalized measurement from individual patient at small sample volume is crucial. In this dissertation, several droplet-based microfluidics platforms have been developed to screen cancer samples of both liquid and solid state for multiplexed analysis all while using small sample volume. A novel computational analysis method, Proteolytic Activity Matrix Analysis (PrAMA), was integrated to perform multiplexed analysis on a family of cancer-related proteases known as metalloproteinases (MPs) including matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and a disintegrin and metalloproteinases (ADAMs). With the development of these microfluidic platforms as well as the research findings of utilizing metalloproteinases as potential biomarker for cancer, this work aims to provide a patient-specific approach for cancer screening and disease monitoring, thus taking one step closer to achieving “precision medicine”.