RSVP Required for hot meal: Please register by Monday, January 11, so that we can provide an accurate count of the number of meals needed. Pay online by credit card or PayPal, or at the door by cash or check.
01-13-16 MEMS in the Real World: Fighting Antibiotic Resistance and Other Adventures
Happy New Year!
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Our January Presentation:The MEMS-powered Suspended Microchannel Resonator is a versatile platform for precision measurement of particles and cell growth. After explaining the principles of SMR, and why a baby is pictured on a diving board, we will discuss SMR’s current and prospective real-world applications:
- Monitoring protein aggregation in injectable therapeutic drugs, which is now used in pharmaceutical development to improve drug safety.
- Rapid Antibiotic Susceptibility Tests (ASTs), which assess microbe growth in the presence of various antibiotics. Measuring changes in cell count and mass with high precision enables the LifeScale platform to return clinically useful AST information on blood infections in just a few hours vs. days for current ASTs. With clinical trials planned for 2016, integration into the clinical workflow will reduce patient mortality, help stem the rise of antibiotic resistance, and reduce medical costs.
- Extending SMR for in-vitro assessments of cancer treatment and problems in fundamental biology.
Along the way we’ll discuss the joys and challenges of a home-grown Santa Barbara company, the role of luck, working with big companies, and the daunting prospect of regulatory compliance.
Our Speaker: Dr. Ken Babcock came to UCSB in 1991 as a post doc after finishing his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard. He then joined Digital Instruments and spent 12 years developing commercial atomic force microscopes in various R&D and executive roles. He co-founded Affinity Biosensors in 2006 to commercialize the SMR for industrial and life science applications. He led the development of the Archimedes Particle Metrology System, now used by pharmaceutical companies to improve drug safety. Since 2012, Ken and his Affinity Bio colleagues have been developing the LifeScale platform for microbiology and clinical applications. Ken was honored as Entrepreneur of the Year at the 2015 South Coast Business & Technology Awards.
This meeting is sponsored in part by
Reicker, Pfau, Pyle and McRoy, Attorneys
For information about the Science & Engineering Council.
visit the SEC web page at http://www.scieng.org
From our Co-Presidents Tim Murphy and Gary Kravetz: Plan now and save the date for our February 10 meeting. We'll have a speaker from InTouch Health.