Advanced Microfluidics and Microdevices Laboratory

Healthcare systems represent one of the six national priorities of the UAE Vision 2021, which is recognized as a key focus sector by the UAE National Innovation Strategy and also signifies an important component of the Economic Vision 2030 of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. The work carried out at the AMMLab aligns with this area in bringing world-class healthcare systems to the UAE and the entire Middle East region.

Most notably, cancer is an important concern, with 78 deaths per 100,000 of the UAE population and it is the intention to reduce this to 64.2 deaths per 100,000 by 2021. The current cancer-related projects being developed in the AMMLab aim to introduce microfluidic devices to capture circulating tumor cells from cancer blood samples and also for forming an array of 3D cancer micro-tissues inside microfluidic chips for high-throughput drug testing. Capturing, enumerating, and characterizing circulating tumor cells from blood samples represents the concept of “liquid biopsy” and brings valuable information to clinics about cancer progression and potential relapses while developing living biochips with 3D cancer micro-tissues for drug testing brings the concept of personalized chemotherapeutics that can be finely-tuned depending on cancer progression.