Non-Destructive Detection and Separation of Radiation Damaged Cells in Miniaturized, Inexpensive Device, Phase II

The end product of the proposed SBIR effort will be a first-of-its-kind, commercially available, compact, low-cost, integrated device for sorting of radiation damaged cells. This device will greatly aid in NASA's efforts to minimize radiation hazard, and develop countermeasures, enabled by fundamental understanding of radiation biological effects at the molecular and cellular level. The device will be of direct use to NASA's ground-based research facilities and amenable for space deployment as well (in-situ gene expression studies in space). In addition, the technology can easily be modified to benefit research efforts focused on other space-induced biological phenomena such as bone loss, immune modulation, oxidative stress among others. It is also expected that the developed technology will find ready applications in the following civilian markets: ? Pharmaceutical and Drug Discovery Companies ? Pre-clinical and Clinical Researchers (in particular stem cell and oncology researchers) ? Hospital & Health Site Monitoring (for nuclear medicine, immune ex-vivo treatments) More »