Emanuel Carrilho

Emanuel Carrilho recently finished a sabbatical with George Whitesides working on paper-based microfluidics, and the "Diagnostics for All" program.  Emanuel first met Prof. Whitesides during his graduate work at the Barnett Institute ten years ago.

(from Martinez, 2007 )

A practical way to detect these emergencies would have tremendous impact. To be available in a common first-aid kit, diagnostics would have to be as cheap as band-aids, stable for long periods, and as simple to use as pregnancy dip-sticks. Microfluidics has long promised portable diagnostics; making it with paper and tape opens it to the world.

"Diagnostics For All” (DFA), a spin-out company of the program, made history last year when it won the grand prizes in the business plan competitions at both MIT and the Harvard Business School, simultaneously. Also, significantly, this was the first time a non-profit won the MIT competition. (see http://www.dfadx.org/ )

Emanuel’s Work – “Paper Plates”
Emanuel has been working on putting hydrophobic coatings or barriers in paper using photolithography. The popular SU8 photoresist is effective, but expensive ($800 / L). Another resist, SC, is tenfold cheaper, and can be diluted 10x (Carrilho, 2009). They also tried everything from crayons to solid-ink printers.

“We first used SC to make a 96-well plate format on paper, and we assayed it with a standard microplate reader. We could easily use fluorescence detection, and even absorbance worked well if we wet the paper with mineral oil. Later we showed the microplate reader could be replaced with a much less expensive desktop scanner." While tying down loose ends on using a consumer-grade solid ink printer, they were scooped by a Chinese group. “We thought it was over, but reviewers remained very receptive, and another manuscript was accepted in Analytical Chemistry. ” (Carrilho, 2009b)

From the Countryside to the Genome Project
Emanuel grew up in a small town, Lencois Paulista, about 3 hours from Sao Paulo City. In elementary school he coveted science kits with names like "Edison" and "Lavoisier", but he couldn't afford them. Later, he teamed up with other kids and salvaged chemicals to play with from a boarded-up dentists office. This initiative took him to college, where he majored in chemistry and became interested in CE and DNA. "I heard about Prof. Karger from a visiting American professor, Harry Pardue. He recommended the Barnett as one of the top programs in Bioanalytical Chemistry, and said that I should look no further."

"Working in the early DNA lab was amazing — a Manhattan Project combining many disciplines. The challenge was inspiring, and the team has been best friends forever." With fellow students Marie Ruiz-Martinez and Oscar Solano-Salas, the team also brought together Jan Berka (molecular biology), Art Miller (bioinformatics), Steve Carson (optics), Dieter Schmalzing (capillary coatings), Wolfgang Goetzinger (polymers), and Franta Foret (CE and instrumentation).

"The project was rich in learning. There were good parties, but those years stand strongest in memory as my best scientific accomplishments. And the results were pretty much what made the Human Genome project feasible — the advent of capillary array sequencers with long reads and high accuracy, achievements which were driven mainly by the Karger, Dovichi and Mathies Groups." Emanuel 's Ph.D. experience meant a professorship waiting for him in Brazil.

To Paper Microfluidics - "Appropriate Technology, Appropriate Intelligence"
Emanuel funded the sabbatical on a proposal to make PDMS chips which could provide an unambiguous "sample-in / answer-out" response, to gain experience in the usual toolbox of valves, detection methods, on-chip processing, etc. However, Whitesides’ group published on paper diagnostics in 2007 (Martinez, 2007), as Emanuel was in transit, and it was a natural fit.

Home Again, Bringing Big Changes With Him
This project has Wings. Emanuel has been running his lab from a distance and looks forward to rejoining his students, and fellow professors, who eager to participate. Even in Brazil, rural areas are a tremendous source of self-sufficient people, who lives have demanded creative ways to fix farm equipment or appliances; people who are also much more familiar with the application – the conditions, the market, the problems yet to be addressed, than the Harvard group. Emanuel will continue to develop paper-based assays and hopefully pass it to DFA to help improve the public health. Some funding has already come forward to provide first-generation devices to social workers surveying the poorest areas of Brazil.

His concerns? "Hopefully the promising results and positive impact of the goals will carry the day, but my sabbatical funding could well complain that my fellowship was to develop PDMS devices, and I never actually made one (until last week, for a simple comparison of flow dynamics)"

(Roger Kautz, Aug 2009)

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