Call for Papers

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

Simple, controllable, and versatile access to the intracellular space with minimal perturbation is crucial to advancing biomedicine. Emerging materials, such as nanoneedles and nanomechanical cell squeezers—are transforming our capacity to sample, sense, perturb, control and deliver to the intracellular environment, and rapidly translating to impact cell and gene therapy, mechanobiology, spatial biology, and neural interfaces. The symposium aims to establish an essential discussion across the relevant research communities in micro- and nano-fabrication, biomaterials design, bioengineering, advanced therapies and medical device manufacturing across three areas: First, the design and manufacturing of devices for cell manipulation including theory and practice of device design and its integration with electronics, fluidics and mechanics; manufacturing methods; control of physical and chemical properties; technology-readiness progress. Second, biointerface design, including analytical, numerical, and machine learning modelling to predict interactions; biomaterial design and surface modifications; characterisation of the biointerface.
Third, biomedical applications including intracellular delivery; intracellular biosensing; biophysical interrogation. The symposium will discuss the potential market, the scale of interest and investment, regulatory issues with input from biomedical industry leaders.

Topics will include:

• design and manufacturing of cell manipulation devices
• device integration with electronics, fluidics and mechanics
• Approaches for surface modification
• Design, modelling and characterisation of the biointerface
• Ultrasensitive nanoprobes for cell traction forces.
• Engineering biophysical interactions.
• Intracellular recording and stimulation.
• Intracellular delivery.
• Minimally invasive intracellular biosensing.
• Biomedical applications.

• A tutorial complementing this symposium is tentatively planned.

Invited Speakers (tentative):

• Paolo Actis (Leeds University, United Kingdom)
• Pascal Behr (Cytosurge AG, Switzerland)
• Jannick Coffinier (University of Lille, France)
• Bianxiao Cui (Stanford University, USA)
• Chi Hwan Lee (Purdue University, USA)
• Song Li (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
• Chwee Teck Lim (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
• Dingchang Lin (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
• Karen Martinez (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
• Roisin Owens (Cambridge University, United Kingdom)
• Hongkun Park (Harvard University, USA)
• Christelle Prinz (Lund University, Sweden)
• Masaru Rao (University of California, Riverside, USA)
• John Rogers (Northwestern University, USA)
• Menahem (Hemi) Rotenberg (Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)
• Francesca Santoro (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy)
• Mark Schvartzman (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)
• Ruchi Sharma (Stemnovate, United Kingdom)
• Peng Shi (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
• Koukou Suu (ULVAC, Inc., Japan)
• Andy Tay (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
• Bozhi Tian (The University of Chicago, USA)
• Nicolas Voelcker (Monash University, Australia)
• Chong Xie (Rice University, USA)
• Sheng Xu (University of California, San Diego, USA)

Symposium Organizers