SUMMARY

Microfluidic technology represents a transformational platform for the high throughput processing of cells for therapeutic and diagnostic applications. In this dissertation, three aims will be presented which use microfluidics to process cells by applying repeated, controlled deformations to solve problems related to personalized and regenerative medicine. First, we will show how photoreceptor cells can be isolated from mixed retinal cell populations, addressing the problem of preparing pure populations of patient-derived photoreceptor cells for treatment of patients with inherited eye disease. Second, we show that microfluidic compressions can be used to improve the genetic engineering of photoreceptor cells in patient-derived iPSCs. Third, label-free microfluidic isolation of metastatic cancer cells from liquid patient specimens will be demonstrated. In the pursuit of these aims, devices were designed to improve usability and increase throughput (by up to 5x) by performing simultaneous cell focusing and transfection with only one inlet. Procedures were also improved to decrease device clogging. In addition, a sorting optimization workflow was developed centering around custom cell-tracking software.