Juncker Lab

Less than two weeks to microTAS 2024 here in Montréal and the excitement is starting to show on the trees adopting their fall foliage 🤩

Only 3 weeks until microTAS 2024! 🍁 🍁 🍁 Montreal is dressing up with fall foliage and will be in full colours shortly. 🍁 🍁 🍁 We can't wait to welcome you all here with my co-chair Aaron Wheeler and learn about all the exciting advances in the field. If you like to blend in with colours, we offer swag with the microTAS and maple leaf 🍁 logo a this year, but for presale only until September 29th. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/ezwf_74x

We want to thank Haowen Tan from the lab of Yifan Chen at University of Electronic Science and Technology of China for his contributions on ELISA-on-a-chip and 3D-printing in the lab during the summer! His impact is further immortalized through the generous gift of many cute Pandas! 🐼🐼🐼🐼

We hung up the lab coats and headed out to Iroquois where we enjoyed great food, warm water, lab olympics and scientific brainstorming sessions! ⛱ ☀

Happy birthday Rosalie Martel! We celebrated with a tipsy tiramisu cake by Molly Shen 🥳

Can 3D printed scaffolds replace PDMS for organ-on-a-chip, cell and tissue engineering? Our latest paper (link in comments) makes some surprising findings. 3D stereolithography printing has made great strides, and many efforts have been dedicated to create scaffolds that could replace PDMS as a material for cell culture. PDMS has many things going for it. It is easy to mold and replicate, it spontaneously seals to glass, is transparent, inert, and crucially for cell culture, it is gas permeable. Many of us who do photoink 3D printing work with low molecular weight PEGDA, which is inert, low viscosity, and can be rapidly printed into transparent, water impermeable constructs with a plastic-like feeling to them. However could PEGDA be used for culturing cells, especially as plastics are not gas permeable, and as PEG is known for its antiadhesive properties that repells molecules and cells alike. In our latest paper, we added between 10% and 30% of a low molecular weight PEG porogen to PEGDA to produce a nanoporous PEDGA, and make some interesting and surprising findings. While initially we thought that the nanoporous network was connected, we came to the conclusion that it was instead isolated pores as fluroescent dyes barely diffuse through it. At 10% porogen concentration, we made the suprising finding that a variety of cells adhered to the nanoporous PEGDA, and that it was highly biocompatible, predisposing it for use in OOC, cell culture and tissue engineering. But maybe the most interesting finding is that with 10% porogen, the nanoporous PEG had an oxygen permeability equal to the one of PDMS, and that it became even more permeable with higher 20% and 30% porogen. Hence we believe nanoporous PEGDA could replace PDMS for many applications that require gas exchange, notably when microfluidic channels come into play. We further show the potential of Nanoporous PEGDA for OoC applications by co-culturing a spheroid with stromal cells, and observing cell interaction and migration, as well as with endothelial cells where we observe the formation of blood vessels. More work is needed to quantify the gas permeability and how process parameters may affect it, but we are already convinced that it will open many new opportunities for 3D cell culture and OoC. As always, big thanks and shout out to all Juncker Lab students and Postdocs who worked on this: Vahid KaramZadeh, Ph.D., Molly Shen, Houda Shafique, Felix Lussier 👏

Happy belated birthday, Hugues! We celebrated with a delicious strawberry shortcake by Molly! 😋

I'm delighted to share the publication of my latest and final piece of research from my PhD work, titled "Nanoporous, Gas Permeable PEGDA Ink for 3D Printing Organ-on-a-Chip Devices," now published in the Journal of Advanced Functional Materials (Impact Factor: 19). In our study, we introduced a porous PEGDA resin (P-PEGDA) with exceptional biocompatibility and oxygen permeability, comparable to PDMS. Utilizing P-PEGDA, we 3D-printed complex microstructures and membranes as thin as 27 µm. Different porogen concentrations were tested, yielding constructs with increasing porosity and oxygen permeability surpassing PDMS, without compromising printing resolution. Additionally, the P-PEGDA showed up to a 77-fold increase in cell coverage compared to nonporous materials due to its porosity. This formulation holds great potential for organ-on-a-chip applications, offering a promising alternative to PDMS. If you're interested in learning more, check out the full publication here: https://lnkd.in/eNiQyfAC A big congratulations to co-authors, Molly Shen, Houda Shafique, Felix Lussier, and heartfelt thanks to David Juncker for his invaluable guidance. Juncker Lab #microfluidics #3D_printing #biomaterials #Organ-on-a-chip

We sent our trusted agent Hugues Martin all the way to Melbourne, Australia for the 2024 International Society for Extracellular Vesicles conference! Congratulations Hugues for winning the poster prize!!! 🥂 #ISEV2024

One mesmerizing video, two stories: 1. A microfluidic timer to remind you that TODAY is the deadline to submit a an abstract to microTAS 2024 that will be in Montreal this fall: https://lnkd.in/dfDF3tWW 2. An ELISA Chip and assay made by low cost, high resolution LCD 3D printing. Our work opens the door for anyone with ~$300 to manufacture high performance, walk-away lab-on-a-chips for assays and other applications. Our manuscript in Lab-on-a-chip has now been assigned an issue and page number: https://lnkd.in/e5wTR_V7 Video credit: Houda Shafique