Lassonde School of Engineering Professor Ebrahim Ghafar-Zadeh has received an ENGAGE NSERC grant that will fund a research project in partnership with Medella Health to develop a High-Density Parallel Drug Tests platform using a standard microelectronic technology, also called Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS).

Ebrahim Ghafar-Zadeh

Current drug test protocols rely on laborious, time consuming and costly conventional cell culture analysis. The proposed technology aims to test drugs in thousands of micro-scale micro-fluidic cell culture devices above CMOS sensors. This process promises to be faster and less costly.

Ghafar-Zadeh’s project will enable technologies that have so far been only used in communications, computer and other consumer electronic applications to function in the medical field. This has great implications for drug discovery and cancer screening processes. The long-term goal is this partnership between Ghafar-Zadeh and Medella Health is to develop a new technology for measuring cellular activities, which can then be used for many applications, including cell-based drug tests for cancer.

Ghafar-Zadeh received his PhD in electrical engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal and completed a NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of California, Berkeley in Bioengineering.

Courtesy of YFile.