Skip to content

saurabhr

  • Home
  • Analytics Apps
    • NBA Headshot Plot
    • NBA Player Combos
    • NBA Playoff Matchups
    • NBA Rotation Finder
    • Exploring the EFL Pyramid

About the Project

For my senior cap­stone at UC San Diego, I, along with 3 oth­er team mem­bers (1 engi­neer, 2 biotech­nol­o­gists), part­nered with a local biotech com­pa­ny, His­to­gen, to engi­neer a small-scale biore­ac­tor. His­to­gen, inter­est­ed in con­duct­ing stem cell research, need­ed a solu­tion that allowed them to con­duct mul­ti­ple tests under con­di­tions that mim­ic phys­i­o­log­i­cal con­di­tions (biore­ac­tor), but in small vol­umes to keep the vol­ume and con­se­quent­ly of stem cells down.

From His­to­gen’s tech­ni­cal bench­marks, our team designed a solu­tion, cre­at­ed a pro­to­type, and final­ly car­ried out exper­i­ments to val­i­date the design. The project was fea­tured at UCSD’s annu­al Bio­engi­neer­ing Day.

Tools Used

Per­son­al Impact

While I helped devel­op the ini­tial design along with the biotech­nol­o­gists, my impact was large­ly in pro­to­typ­ing and test­ing. After our team came togeth­er on a final design, I was respon­si­ble for mod­el­ing, cre­at­ing and design­ing the pro­to­type biore­ac­tor. I also designed the test pro­to­col to val­i­date the flu­id mechan­ics of the device and sourced the mate­r­i­al for pro­to­type creation.

Project Details

Back­ground

For my senior cap­stone project, I, along with 3 team mem­bers (1 oth­er engi­neer­ing stu­dent, 2 biotech­nol­o­gy stu­dents), part­nered with a local biotech com­pa­ny, His­to­gen, to design a small-scale biore­ac­tor. His­to­gen’s small­est biore­ac­tor was 50 mL. Con­se­quent­ly, the cost of run­ning mul­ti­ple stem cell exper­i­ments in par­al­lel was cost-pro­hib­i­tive. Our goal was to cre­ate a ster­il­iz­able, small-scale that would cut down exper­i­ment cost for the company.

Process

This ini­tial­ly start­ed with explorato­ry sketch­es to iden­ti­fy dif­fer­ent biore­ac­tor forms and designs for main­tain­ing solu­tion agitation. 

The two biotech­nol­o­gy majors on our team con­duct­ed ini­tial research on the min­i­mum tech­ni­cal para­me­ters (flu­id lev­els, flow speed, etc.) required to still be use­ful for the type of exper­i­ments His­to­gen would be con­duct­ed. From there our team ideat­ed on poten­tial solu­tions, even­tu­al­ly nar­row­ing down to a few solu­tions that were fleshed out in CAD

Design Alternative 2
Design Alternative 3
protofinal

Based on the feed­back from His­to­gen’s sci­en­tists, we pro­ceed­ed to flesh out a sin­gle design, high­light­ed in the video below.

From the above design, I, along with the oth­er engi­neer in the group cre­at­ed a work­ing pro­to­type. Mate­r­i­al choice was large­ly dic­tat­ed by it’s abil­i­ty to ster­il­ized via auto­clave and cost.

We then designed a series of exper­i­ments to test actu­al flu­id flow in the device. The main areas we sough to address were the water tight­ness of the device, the speed at which flu­ids could be effec­tive­ly ran through the sys­tem, and the lev­el of agi­ta­tion we were able to induce to poten­tial cell cultures.

Out­come

In con­clu­sion, our final design was able to cut His­to­gen’s exper­i­ment mate­r­i­al cost by 33% and the par­al­lelized 6‑channel biore­ac­tor allowed for quick­er turn­around on experiments.

select­ed work

  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • Github
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
Proudly powered by WordPress
×