SUMMARY

Cell processing lies at the heart of modern medicine. While in the past, the treatment of diseases such as cancer was based mostly on the cancer’s tissue of origin and histological classification, today these decisions are also informed by detailed functional and molecular characterization of a patient’s own cancer cells, a practice commonly referred to as ‘personalized medicine’. Treatments for cancer and other diseases have also recently evolved to use manufactured cell therapies derived from the patient’s own tissue, such as CAR-T cell therapies for leukemia, and patient iPSC-derived photoreceptor replacement therapies for inherited retinal degenerative blindness. In this dissertation, I will detail the development of microfluidic platforms capable of solving significant issues in current cell processing pipelines for personalized and regenerative medicine applications. First, I will describe my development of a label-free, microfluidic approach for the isolation of metastatic cancer cells from liquid biopsies of ovarian cancer patients, demonstrating how this technology can enhance both diagnostics and prognostics in cancer treatment. Next, I will demonstrate how microfluidics can be used to separate dissociated human retina into therapeutically relevant subpopulations as an example of how these techniques can be used to separate cells with a desired phenotype from cells of related lineages to enhance the potency of iPSC derived cell therapies. Finally, I will present my work on the development of microfluidic methodologies to enable high-efficiency, reagent-free delivery of macromolecules to iPSC cells. Taken together, this work demonstrates the promise of microfluidics to revolutionize the fields of cancer treatment, cell manufacturing and regenerative medicine.