Dr. Bruce K. Gale
Director, State of Utah Center of Excellence for Biomedical Microfluids
Chair and Merit Medical Systems Professor, Dept of Mechanical Engineering
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84123
bruce.gale@utah.edu
About Dr. Bruce K. Gale
Dr. Bruce K. Gale received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University in 1995 and his PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Utah in 2000. He was an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at Louisiana Tech University before returning to the University of Utah in 2001 where he is now Chair and a professor of Mechanical Engineering. He is currently Director of the Utah State Center of Excellence for Biomedical Microfluidics, a center devoted to research and commercialization activities around microfluidic devices. He has published more than 150 journal papers and been recognized with multiple awards. His primary interests include solving medical, biology, and chemistry problems using a variety of microfluidic approaches to complex and challenging medical and biological assays. His ultimate goal is to develop platforms for personalized medicine, which should allow medical treatments to be customized to the needs of individual patients. As an outgrowth of his work, 6 companies have been formed and he maintains a role at each. The most prominent is Carterra, a multiplexed instrument development company focused on protein characterization in the pharmaceutical industry that was spun out of his lab in 2005. The others include: Espira, which focuses on pathogen detection and exosome separations; wFluidx, which focuses on genotyping zebrafish embryos; and Microsurgical Innovations, which focuses on miniature medical devices. He is a member of the National Academy of Inventors and holds more than 27 patents.
Abstract
Complete lab-on-a chip or micro total analysis systems (m-TAS) require a wide variety of microfluidic components for the completion of complex and challenging medical and biological assays. One of the approaches to microfluidic devices is use “inertial” microfluidics, which rely on both lift and wall repulsion forces of generate particle focusing. These forces can be used to separate a wide range of cells. This presentation will focus on using these forces to separate and process sperm from semen samples, blood cells of different kinds, and to separate blood cells by deformability level. The physics of these devices, their fabrication, and the general concept of the devices will be presented. These separations can be applied to challenges in infertility, malaria, and sample preparation in microfluidic devices.