Location
Boston University has a strong commitment to bioengineering research. In the spring of 2017 that commitment manifested itself in a nine story, $150 million building called the “Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering”. This building houses the Biological Design Center (BDC) and its flagship Design, Automation, Manufacturing, and Prototyping (DAMP) Lab. DAMP Lab South, specifically, hosts two sectors for biological automation: the Biofoundry Integrated Instrumentation System and the Microfluidics Design and Manufacturing platform.
Biofoundry Integrated Instrumentation System
The Biofoundry Integrated Instrumentaion System (BIIS) represents a fundamental paradigm shift in the design of living systems not currently available to academic labs in the United States.
This presents three major opportunities to the scientific community:
1) The BIIS will become a research focus itself by demonstrating how to create new biological systems that are developed some combination of faster, cheaper, replicable, more exhaustive, standardized, more analyzable, or parameterizable.
2) Second, the operators, technicians, postdoctoral researchers, graduate, and undergraduate students all gain expertise and training on a state-of-the-art piece of equipment that only exists in a handful of institutions around the world.
3) Finally,the BIIS will be available to a network of worldwide users as a “design-build-test”service fully integrated into a freely open software interface. This will democratize exclusive, high end biology protocols and standardize many artisanal experimental protocols.
Microfluidics
DAMP Lab South also houses the Microfluidics development and research group, working particularly in microfluidics large scale integration; precise control over the flow of biological content within microscale devices; free design-to-device software; inexpensive, desktop micromills for fabricating microfluidic devices; and acoustic manipulation in disposable, plastic microchannels, with the goals to provide more reliable and scalable construction of synthetic biological systems. The integration of microfluidics and synthetic biology has the capability to produce rapid prototyping platforms for characterization of genetic devices, testing of biotherapeutics, and development of biosensors.
To know more about the work being developed by the microfluidics division, please visit:
