The elasticity of human oocytes has been estimated by means of a very simple SU-8 microsystem. The device consists of a double SU-8 layer spin coated on a silicon wafer. A micro-beam is patterned by standard photolithography. The silicon wafer is back etched using deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) in order to release the micro-beam. Because the SU-8 resin exhibits a very low Young modulus, beams with stiffnesses of 12 N/m have been easily fabricated. Although the stiffness is not as low as that of Atomic Force Microscopes cantilevers, it was possible to estimate the "deformation-load" characteristics of a few oocytes. A "flattening parameter" of the oocytes is proposed as a function of the applied load and experimental values range from 0.86 microm(2)/Pa to 3.4 microm(2)/Pa for the oocytes under test. Note that this paper belongs to the very few communications concerning the mechanical behaviour of human oocytes.
Nowadays, Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs) are new generation of pharmaceuticals which offer novel and revolutionary answer to be given to patients at the end of their therapeutic options. However, because of their prohibitive cost, they can only be proposed to a reduced number of patients. One possibility to reduce ATMP' price is to automate their production as much as possible. Among the numerous possibilities, a real-time and closed loop monitoring of the T-cell growth during the expansion phase would be appreciated. In this short paper, we propose a simple white light spectroscopy method which can be easily implemented in such an autonomous device and able to monitor T-cell number evolution with a higher accuracy as compared to current cell counting methods.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.