Our lab is also working on a sensor technology that can continuously measure the number of cells, chemical concentration, and/or biomarker on individual microcarriers in a bioreactor without disrupting the manufacturing process. Specifically, our lab is working on embedding micro-size wireless sensors within each microcarrier and then remotely monitoring the responses of these microsensors and their locations. The microsensors are made of magnetoelastic materials, which when exposed to a magnetic AC field, produce submicron level vibrations at specific resonance frequencies and generate secondary magnetic fields that can be remotely monitored. Since their vibration frequencies are depending on the mechanical loadings (mass of the surrounding material), these microsensors can wirelessly track changes in cell growth/attachment on the microcarriers by measuring their resonance frequency shifts. To detect chemicals or biomarkers, these microsensors can be functionalized with various chemical-sensing materials that alter their elasticity in response to the analyte(s) of interest.

The motivation behind this project is to address the slow clinical adoption of cell therapies due to the lack of scalable manufacturing process for cells, with uneven reproducibility, affordability, and safety across different facilities and labs. Today the longitudinal determination of cell number and quality in a bioreactor is still labor-intensive, interruptive, and/or inaccurate for many bioreactors especially those that do not have a homogeneous cell suspension. Continuous monitoring approaches that can track cell numbers and local microenvironmental conditions are needed to ensure the fabrication conditions stay within the constraints throughout the whole manufacturing process.