Lisa Thompson, RN, PhD, FNP
Associate Professor, UCSF School of Nursing
​Thursday, March 3 2016, 6 pm (Meet and greet with food at 5:30 pm)
Cory Hall 540 (note room change)

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​Premature or just too small? Tools to assess and address prematurity in low income countries are few and far between

Globally, the leading cause of death in children under 5 is complications from preterm birth. More than 15 million babies are born prematurely each year, and nearly 1 million die within the first month of life. Efforts to assess and address prematurity in low-income settings are hindered by lack of low-cost, affordable technologies that can be implemented by community health workers and semi-skilled health professionals. We need to develop new tools to: 1) identify women at risk of preterm births, 2) identify, treat and refer preterm infants born at home and 3) ultimately, encourage facility-based deliveries where preterm infants will receive care. In this talk, I will review potential and proven interventions to detect preterm infants that have been proposed around the world. I will discuss the application and limitations of these interventions, using rural Guatemala as a case study.

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Dr. Lisa Thompson, RN, FNP, PhD is an associate professor in the School of Nursing at UCSF and the program director for the doctoral program in Global Health Studies at the University of California, San Francisco. She received her master’s and doctorate degrees in Environmental Health Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Thompson’s research focuses on environmental health disparities that contribute to low birth weight and adverse perinatal outcomes. She was recently funded by the National Institutes of Health to investigate the impact of a gas stove/behavior intervention on personal exposures to household air pollution among pregnant women and their neonates in rural Guatemala. She is principal investigator for a project funded by Grand Challenges Canada (Stars in Public Health, Phase I grant) and partners with co-investigators at Universidad del Valle, and a social enterprise, GenteGas in urban Guatemala. Using a market-based approach, GenteGas is training a cadre of women entrepreneurs to distribute gas stoves and to discuss gas safety and health messages. In 2008, she received the Blum Award for Distinguished Social Action from her alma mater, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, for her work with rural indigenous communities in Guatemala and her work as a family nurse practitioner at La Clínica de la Raza in Oakland, California. Dr. Thompson is the recipient of a UCSF Faculty Development Award (2008-9), the UCSF CTSI KL2 Research Scholar Award (2011-2015), and the UCSF Burke Family Global Health Faculty Award (2008-2013).

Dr. Thomas Chiesl, PhD
New Technology and Microfluidic Development Lead
Ibis Biosciences, a division of Abbott Labs

Thursday, February 18, 2016 6:00 pm (Food starting at 5:30 pm)
Blum Hall B100

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Development of the Mobile Analysis Platform (MAPs)

Dr. Chiesl will discuss:
1. i-STAT, a mature Abbott technology, the i-STAT, which has production of over 1 million cartridges per month and is arguably the most successful point of care device in existence.
2. MAPs (mobile analysis platform), a platform in the R&D phase which also seeks to cross the “diagnostic development valley of death”. The MAPs device is a truly field-portable hand-held battery operated device capable of performing highly multiplexed RT-PCR using a microfluidic cartridge with minimal training and returns answers in ~1 hour with assays for a wide variety of pathogens such as Ebola, Flu, Anthrax, STDs, and Zika virus 

Background:
The field of microfluidics has transformed the way researchers investigate chemical and biological phenomenon by miniaturizing the scale of reagent manipulation and sample analysis. The potential for microfluidics in conjunction with point of care instrumentation is tremendous yet success and wide spread adoption in the commercial arena is lagging behind. One of the standby jokes told at conferences still remains: “Is it a lab-on-a-chip or a chip-in-a-lab?” Another criticism regarding the field is that microfluidic devices often generate elegant solutions to problems that nobody is desperate to solve. Successful commercial deployment requires both a functional product and a receptive market eager to adopt it for an identifiable cost- or performance-related reason.
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About Dr. Chiesl:
Dr. Thomas N. Chiesl has spent his research career in development of bioanalytical techniques, chemistry, microfabrication / microfluidics, and instrumentation development. His Ph.D. and Post-Doctoral research in the labs of Dr. Annelise Barron and Dr. Rich Mathies (UC Berkeley) has focused on development of materials (polymeric and nanoparticles) for use in microfluidic devices and the integration and optimization of electrophoretic analysis techniques applied towards molecular analysis of organic compounds. He has experience in the design, fabrication, and implementation of glass and injection-molded plastic microfluidic devices and has experience developing microfluidic systems for NASA / JPL and was a part of the extended science team on the Urey instrument package on the ExoMars mission. At Ibis, Tom works on new technology
development and leads developmental efforts in microfluidics, hand-held instrumentation, detection chemistry, ultra-fast 15 min PCR, and nanopore technology. Dr. Chiesl’s continuing goals are to establish academic collaborations the bridge the gap between academia and industry, develop new technology, and adapt and transition new technology into products that will positively impact people’s health and happiness.

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Greg Sommer, PhD
Founder and CEO, Sandstone Diagnostics

Tuesday, April 14, 2015 6:00 pm (Food starting at 5:30 pm)
Blum Hall B100

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Bringing diagnostics to the home: a start-up's outlook on consumer healthcare

People have never been more eager to take control of their health, and the tremendous advances in diagnostic technologies are ready to meet the demand. Despite this exciting opportunity there still exist many challenges in launching consumer medical products including FDA oversight, marketing, physician adoption, and investor hesitation. In this talk, I will discuss the current consumer healthcare landscape from the perspective of a medical device start-up company trying to change the way people think about and manage their health. I will include an overview of Sandstone's history, products, challenges, key decisions, and lessons learned in developing diagnostic tools for the consumer market.
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Greg Sommer is a co-founder and CEO of Sandstone Diagnostics - an early stage medical device company developing an over-the-counter male fertility test kit. Greg received a B.S. degree from Iowa State University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan in Mechanical Engineering. Prior to founding Sandstone in 2012, Greg was a senior scientist at Sandia National Labs where he led development of point-of-care clinical diagnostic technologies.

Stefano Bertozzi, MD PhD
Dean, School of Public Health
Professor, Health Policy and Management
UC  Berkeley

March 17, 2015 6:00 pm (Food starting at 5:30 pm)
Blum Hall B100

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HIV Prevention Interventions & Performance Management: What Can We Learn From the Data

The access to large datasets containing management information of health facilities represents an opportunity to analyze and improve the performance and efficiency of such facilities. The heterogeneity observed across facilities is related not only to the diseases that they treat but also to their management decisions. This seminar presents (with concrete examples of HIV interventions in Africa and Mexico) what decision makers could learn from the data to improve the performance of the facilities.
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Dr. Bertozzi began his service as dean and professor of health policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health in September 2013. Previously he was a senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he has directed the HIV and tuberculosis programs and led a team that manages the foundation’s portfolio of grants in HIV vaccine development, biomedical prevention research, diagnostics, and strategies for introduction and scaling-up of interventions. He oversaw the development of a new initiative in efficiency and effectiveness, and represented the private foundation’s constituency on the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. He also serves on the scientific advisory boards for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the National Institute of Health’s Office of AIDS Research and the World Health Organization.

Prior to joining the Gates Foundation, Dr. Bertozzi worked at the Mexican National Institute of Public Health as director of its Center for Evaluation Research and Surveys. He led economics and statistics teams that conducted impact evaluations of large health and social programs in Mexico, as well as in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He also led the institute’s AIDS/Sexually Transmitted Infections research group.  Before moving to Mexico he was part of UNAIDS' founding management team after being the last person to lead WHO's Global Programme on AIDS. He is a physician and a health economist and received his training at MIT, UCSD and UCSF.

Development of the PanDx integrated diagnostic platform

Wallace White
Director, Point-of-Care Diagnostics
Stratos Product Development

March 5, 2015 6:00 pm (Food starting at 5:30 pm)
Blum Hall room 330

After a decade developing point-of-care diagnostics for commercial clients, Stratos Product Development was approached by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for a bigger challenge: creating a single system capable of all the diagnostics needed at primary health clinics in developing countries. In this—the first public talk on the project—Wallace White will describe the development of the PanDx system and share observations from the health-clinic visits on three continents that have informed it.

Physical Phenotyping

Prof. Dino Di Carlo, UCLA
February 17, 2015 3:00 pm (Food starting at 2:30 pm)
Blum Hall room 330

Physical properties of cells can provide integrative, rapid, and low-cost information about disease. I will discuss a range of microtechnologies that assay the physical properties of cells in a high-throughput and quantitative manner for applications in diagnostics and drug screening. Amongst the host of physical properties (the cellular physome) we have initially focused on the development of instruments that measure single-cell properties associated with metastasis and invasion, immune activation, and cell differentiation state. These include deformability, size, morphology, motility, adhesiveness, and contractility. In this talk I will introduce high-throughput and quantitative approaches addressing three of these areas – deformability cytometry, force phenotyping, and vortex trapping. These tools are achieving the promise of cost-effective and rapid sample preparation, diagnosis and screening for assaying immune cell function, tumor cell malignancy, and other cell fate decisions.
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Dino Di Carlo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Los Angeles where he directs the Microfluidic Biotechnology Laboratory. He is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), and Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center – Cancer Nanotechnology Program Area.  He received his B.S. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and received a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco in 2006 in Luke Lee’s BioPOETS Lab. He then conducted postdoctoral studies from 2006-2008 at the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital under the guidance of Mehmet Toner. His research focuses on exploiting unique physics, microenvironment control, and the potential for automation associated with miniaturized systems for applications in basic biology, medical diagnostics, and cellular engineering.  He is actively involved in technology entrepreneurship, serving as a co-founder of CytoVale, Vortex Biosciences, and Tempo Therapeutics. Among other honors he was recently awarded the Analytical Chemistry Young Innovator Award in 2014, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Early CAREER Award and U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award in 2012, a Packard Fellowship and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award in 2011, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award and Coulter Translational Research Award in 2010.

Microfluidics as an enabling technology for POC – where are we today?

Holger Becker, PhD, Microfluidic ChipShop
February 10, 2015 6 pm (Food starting at 5:30 pm)
Blum Hall B100

25 years after the introduction of the concept of the “miniaturized total chemical analysis system (µTAS)” and about 15 years after the gold digger`s frenzy about how this technology would revolutionize all aspects of chemical, biochemical or diagnostic analyses, it is worth to have a look how his technology has matured. For practically all new diagnostic kits, microfluidics plays an important enabling role. The ability to integrate complete diagnostic assays on a single device is hereby the decisive advantage which is reflected in the dramatically growing number of microfluidics-enabled products in the diagnostic market. It is my firm belief that we see a significant part of the early day’s promises being fulfilled and a rapidly growing range of applications and products. A review on roadblocks as well as success factors for the commercialization of microfluidic devices will be given as well as an overview on commercially available manufacturing routes with their specific application to diagnostics. Several examples of products and their development characteristics will be presented.
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Dr Holger Becker is co-founder and CSO of microfluidic ChipShop GmbH. He obtained physics degrees from the University of Western Australia/Perth and the University of Heidelberg. He started to work on miniaturized systems for chemical analysis during his PhD thesis at Heidelberg University, where he obtained his PhD in 1995. Between 1995 and 1997 he was a Research Associate at Imperial College with Prof. Andreas Manz. In 1998 he joined Jenoptik Mikrotechnik GmbH. Since then, he founded and led several companies in the field of microsystem technologies in medicine and the life sciences. He lead the Industry Group of the German Physical Society between 2004 and 2009, has been the chair of the SPIE ‘‘Microfluidics, BioMEMS and Medical Microsystems’’ conference since 2009 and was co-chair of MicroTAS 2013. He serves on the Editorial Board of “Lab-on-a-Chip” and “Physik-Journal” as well as acting as a regular reviewer of project proposals on a national and international level.