Sharif Digital Repository

Today, the determination and therapy of numerous illnesses, including malignant growth, relies upon the information and assessment of platelets, so blood testing and cell examination is fundamental to survey the movement of disease. The lab on a chip innovation is utilized as an extremely productive device in cell studies. The lab on a chip is used as a foundation and a substrate for making a legitimate stream for cell processes in medication. This innovation is a gadget or framework with millimeters or centimeters aspects like a chip, and it performs research facility handling on a micron-scale. In spite of the fact that it has a few impediments, it has so many values; for example, it... 

In recent decades, metal nanoparticles have been used in medicine for example in cancer treatment. There have always been debates on the nanoparticles specifications such as particle size, amount of surface charge and the particle material. Meanwhile, the study on selecting appropriate properties of nanoparticles for this purpose is very essential and expensive in medical science. In order to access the best efficiency and the least mortality of the patients in treatments, simulation studies can support the medical scientists. In this thesis, the goal is to study transferring nanoparticles as a drug or included drugs through created hypothetical micro-channels in cancerous cells membrane.... 

This thesis is about multidisciplinary design optimization of MRI ¬controlled robots with a nonlinear model approach in the cardiovascular system and simulates its behavior to reach cancer cells. Such robots, designed to perform medical procedures with minimal side effects to the patient, include a set of ferromagnetic nanoparticles attached to the polymer and disposable drugs such as cancer drugs.The disciplines considered in this issue include structure, hydrodynamics, propulsion, controllability, and trajectory. The proposed model in this study, in addition to the main forces acting on the robot such as magnetic force, hydrodynamics, and apparent weight, also examines other forces due to... 

From a long time ago cancer has been threatening human’s health, and researchers have been grappling with the phenomenon for numerous years. In the annals of this struggle, the number of cancer victims has outnumbered the survivals in a way that,until recently, suffering from cancer was perceived to be equivalent to death. Permanent defeat against cancer stems from the incomplete recognition of the phenomenon. In recent years, with the advent of technologies to extract information from the heart of cells and at the genome and transcriptome levels, man has been able to acquire a deeper understanding of cancer, its behavior and operation. Now that cancer is regarded to be a genetic disease,... 

The development of technologies and some defects in medicine caused to emerge a new approach called precision medicine. Unlike the traditional medicine, medical experts do best treatment for each patient based on his genetic characteristics in this approach. Predicting drug response on cancer cell lines is one of the most vital challenges in this area. Various approaches have been proposed to construct predicting models while the substantial distinctions between resistant and sensitive cell lines had been neglected in them. Here, we propose a new approach for constructing the predictive model. In our approach, we utilized the distinctions between sensitive and resistant cell lines and also... 

Cancer is a complicated disease. So, cancer treatment can not be possible without understanding its complex behavior. Each of cells do inner operations spontaneously and have interactions on external environment. This feature of cells has caused to model their behaviors using multi-agents and considering each cell as an intelligent agent. Using this approach, a novel multi-scale agent-based model known as basic model has been introduced. Furthermore, two signaling pathways have been added to this model. For simulation, a new agent-based modeling framework has been proposed. After that, learning has been involved, for considering drug effects. Finally, by means of this model we can predict... 

Despite the extensive research conducted so far to treat cancer, this disease is still one of the main causes of death worldwide. The results of recent studies reveal the importance of the tumor microenvironment in the growth, proliferation, and invasion of the primary tumor. Most common models in cancer research, such as 2-dimensional in vitro models and xenografts, do not have sufficient ability to mimic the interaction of tumors with human stromal tissue. Therefore, the implementation of 3-dimensional in vitro models with the ability to replicate tumor microenvironments is essential. In this study, a microfluidic platform has been introduced to create parallel models of the tumor... 

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) isolation from a blood sample has an important value in cancer research and its treatment. Microfluidics provides a great potential for target cell separation from biological samples by using different physical principles. Among the microfluidic cell separation methods, the inertial microfluidic devices are advantageous in handling samples for point-of-care diagnostics due to their simple structure, fast, label-free and low-cost characteristics. In this thesis, first, we designed and investigated the application of a symmetric serpentine inertial microfluidic device for the separation of CTCs from whole blood. For this purpose, numerical modeling was performed... 

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the world, with a high annual cost of treatment. As the cancer progresses, the cancer cells in the bloodstream metastasize to other parts of the body, causing the disease to spread throughout the patient's body and disrupt organ functions. sepration of cancer cells in the bloodstream inhibits the growth of cancer. Cancer cells differ from healthy cells in some features, such as size, electrical charge and polarization. These features can be used to seprate cancer cells from healthy cells.In this study, cell surface electrical charge was used as a biomarker to seprate cancer cells. By passing blood flow through a chanal and applying an electrical... 

In this study a droplet-based microfluidic system is desighned and fabricated to effectiverly lyse MCF7 cells and extract and purify their DNAs. The main purpose of this study is to transfer all the steps from macro scale to a microfluidic system containing a fluidic chip. This system is a semi automatic system and every part of the lysis and purification process is performed in one step. The first step is to encapsulate single cells and multi cells inside the droplets. By controlling the concentration of the cell solution, the number of encapsulated cells inside the droplet is efficiently and easily controlled and the cells were encapsulated as single cells and as multi cells inside the... 

Diseases such as cancer lead to extensive conversion in the biological structure of cells. These conversions can overshadow cell function. The dynamics of a cell directly depends on how it interacts with other cells and the extracellular environment. Most of these interactions are associated with the occurrence of mechanical phenomena and are due to forces that the cell has experienced. Cell mechanics manifests itself in the Mechanotransduction, the ability of a cell to sense and respond to external forces. Cancer alters the mechanical properties of the components of the cytoskeleton. Understanding the biomechanical behavior of cells and cytoskeleton can play an important role in early... 

Today, microfluidic experiments have found wide applications in medical sciences, engineering, and chemistry. Because of their small size, microfluidic devices help us to be able to use very little amount of sample for the experiments and also easily control and observe the under-experiment fluid. One of the most important applications of these devices is the separation of cancer cells in blood for counting their number and DNA genetic studies. In the current project we have tried to do the separation of cancer cells from other cells by designing an inertia microchannel. For this purpose, in the first step a geometry for the channel is designed with analyzing the induced forces on the cells.... 

In this project, two centrifugal microfluidic platforms with the goal of separation and genetical study of circulating tumor cells have been designed, simulated and fabricated. Circulating tumor cells are the ones that are detached from the cancer tumors, entered the blood and disseminated the danger of cancer through other parts of the body. Both passive and active methods of separation are investigated in this study. The passive method is based on the inertial effects of the fluid and the active method is based on the magnetophoretic force exerted from an external magnetic field. In order to use the active method, the magnetic nanoparticles are attached to the breast cancer cells by the... 

Nowadays, we are witnesses of deaths caused by cancer in large statistical amounts. Vast number of investigations are conducted for anticancer drug evaluation on human and animal cells using traditional two-dimensional and three-dimensional culturing platforms. However, most of them are not successful due to the lack of in-vivo relevant microenvironment in these platforms. One of the best cancer in-vitro cultures is the tumor spheroid which is a spherical cellular aggregation. By culturing these tumor spheroids in a microfluidic chip, it is possible to mimic the in-vivo microenvironment elements such as nutrient and metabolite gradients. Here we present a microfluidic device fabricated using... 

Particle separation has a variety of applications in biology, chemistry and industry. Among them, circulating tumor cells (CTCs) separation has drawn significant attention to itself due to its high impact on both cancer diagnosis and therapeutics. In recent years, there has been growing interest in using inertial microfluidics to separate micro/nano particles based on their sizes. This technique offers label-free, high throughput, and efficient separation and can be easily fabricated. However, further improvements are needed for potential clinical applications. In this study, a novel inertial separation technique using spiral microchannel with stair-like cross section is introduced. The... 

A complete understanding of high-intensity focused ultrasound-induced temperature changes in tissue requires insight into all potential mechanisms for heat deposition. Applications of therapeutic ultrasound often utilize acoustic pressures capable of producing cavitation activity. Recognizing the ability of bubbles to transfer acoustic energy into heat generation, a study of the role bubbles play in tissue hyperthermia becomes necessary. These bubbles are typically less than 50μm.
This dissertation examines the contribution of bubbles and their motion to an enhanced eating effect observed in a tissue-mimicking phantom. A series of experiments established a lationship between bubble... 

Separating cells from a mixed sample is a required task in biotechnology and modern medicine, for example to isolate CTC’s that are of interest for doing therapy and diagnosing or doing research. A minute percentage of target cells must be separated from a large amount of unwanted cells. These target cells like CTC’s could be as rare as 1 target cell per millions of unwanted background cells. Hence Microfluidic cell sorting schemes based upon fluorescent labelling, electrophoresis, dielectrophoresis and magnetophoresis have been devised. Microfluidic magnetically-activated cell sorting (MACS) does not need any optical instrument or current source and electrode. By using an electromagnet or... 

The biocompatibility and chemical stability of boron nitride nanomaterials surpass those of carbon nanomaterials. In addition, boron nitride nanomaterials share the same structure as graphene materials, making them a suitable replacement for graphene in biological applications. In this study, SKOV3 cancer cells were actively targeted using amine-functionalized boron nitride quantum dots that were covalently modified by CD133 antibody. Under the condition that they are not conjugated with antibody, these nanoparticles were also incorporated into the microfluidic device designed to image MCF7 cancer cells. These nanoparticles were produced via solvothermal synthesis in an organic solvent... 

Cancer is an abnormal growth of cells which is one of the major cause of worldwide’s mortality. Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) are rare cancer cells released from the primary or metastatic tumors and transported though the peripheral circulatory system and spreads in body and seize healthy organs. Early detection of CTCs can help in overtaking the cancer, hence isolation of CTCs is an essential step for many therapeutics. In spite of its clinical potential, the isolation and detection of CTCs has been a challenging task due to its rare presence amongst other blood cells (as low as 1–10 CTCs per billions of blood cells), similarity to white blood cell in size and also variability in terms of... 

Cancer is the second leading cause of death among humans as one of the major human concerns. More than 500,000 people die of cancer each year in the United States alone. Cancer mortality is mainly due to cancer metastasis. Metastasis is the escape of cancer cells from a primary tumor, the circulation of cells in the circulatory system (CTSs), the penetration of/from vessel wall, and the formation of a secondary tumor. It is still not clear how the cells survive in the circulatory system, along with the mechanical pressures and stresses that exist in the body's capillary channals. In this study, a microcirculation model for circulating cells with barriers was designed and constructed by the...