Jacobs Institute Translational Seminar

Thursday, March 5, 2015

3:00pm to 4:00pm

"Genomic Applications of Droplet Microfluidics"

Darren Link, “Genomic Applications of Droplet Microfluidics”, RainDance Technologies Inc.,

Social and Refreshments at 2:30 p.m. in Spalding Lab 113

Seminar at 3 p.m. in Spalding Lab 106

Speaker: Dr. Darren R. Link, co-founder and chief technology officer, RainDance Technologies Inc.

Abstract: The need for detecting, quantifying and monitoring genetic changes in cancers is driving the development of new tools for human genetic analysis. In this presentation I will describe my experience taking droplet microfluidic technology from a postdoc research project to a startup company, RainDance Technologies, where we are commercializing new genomics tools for biologists. The first of these tools provides a method for uniformly enriching thousands of different target portions of a patient's genome prior to DNA sequencing analysis, by preparing millions of individual PCR reactions in microfluidic droplets. This enrichment enables an oncologist to identify and quantify low prevalence mutations in heterogeneous tumor samples. A second tool exploits the small volume and confinement of picoliter‐sized droplets to set up and fluorescently count up to 10 million single‐molecule digital PCR reactions, precisely quantifying the presence of low level mutations in a high background of wild‐type DNA. Microfluidic‐enabled assays like these promise to allow 'liquid biopsies'.

Host: JIMEM Director Prof. Rustem Ismagilov

Contact: [email protected]

For more information, please contact Natasha Shelby by phone at 6263952333 or by email at [email protected].