Overview

The Integrated Microfluidics and Microsensors Laboratory at Mayo Clinic, led by Yuguang Liu, Ph.D, is a multidisciplinary research team that develops novel microfluidic and nanotechnologies. Standing at the junction of engineering, medicine research and clinical applications, the vision of the laboratory is to seek answers to long-standing, unanswered questions in human health and medicine. Aims include better understanding disease mechanisms on a cellular and molecular level. Dr. Liu and her colleagues also address practical challenges in healthcare, including innovating tools that can enable data-driven, individualized medicine.

One of the laboratory's research goals is to develop droplet microfluidic devices and use single-cell sequencing to understand cell-cell interactions on a single cell level, such as the interaction between microbial and immune cells. This effort can eventually help understand the underlying mechanism of the maintenance and disruption of microbe-immune system symbiosis, and also lead to the discovery of effective intervention strategies for a range of acute and chronic conditions, such as infectious and autoimmune diseases and cancer. This work is funded by the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Dr. Liu and her team also aim to develop point-of-care and point-of-need microfluidic tools to closely monitor the gradual changes in one's health status in a noninvasive manner. For example, we develop automated microfluidic devices and sensors to monitor peripheral immune markers as a noninvasive way to examine key indicators of one's immune status and therapeutic responsiveness. These tools can be easily used on a regular basis to obtain time-longitudinal data to reconstruct the trajectory of the immune response dynamics. This information can be used to design new, personalized tools to effectively monitor immune-mediated therapeutic responses to treatments such as cancer immunotherapies.

Dr. Liu also has experience in developing microfluidic technologies for space exploration. An example includes a microfluidic device that led to the discovery of preferential genetic alterations in single microbial cells that survived extraterrestrial conditions on the International Space Station. Building off this foundation, the laboratory is seeking to leverage current research efforts and explore broader impacts into space biology and astronaut health.