The Draper Technology Digest - Draper Laboratory

The 2011 Excellence in Innovation AwardJason O. Fiering received the 2011 Excellence in InnovationAward for his work on a novel microfluidic acousticpathogen separation technique for sepsis therapy.Draper is taking on the problem of cleansing the blood ofpatients with sepsis as a radical approach to saving livesthat would otherwise be lost. Sepsis, which is a severecondition that can arise in response to overwhelmingbacterial infection, is a major cause of death in both civilianand military environments. The notion of cleansingthe blood has been suggested often, but is not yet usedas a therapy. The concept is to literally extract from thecirculating blood not only the offending pathogens, butalso the associated toxins and some of the body’s owninflammatory factors. A bedside machine would processblood and return it to the patient, working somewhat liketoday’s hemodialysis systems. However, it is a complexchallenge to selectively remove the unwanted elementsfrom the blood while retaining the remainder in a healthystate.Our innovation uses biocompatible “capture particles” toscavenge the blood for these unwanted elements and thenuse microfluidic ultrasonic sorting to extract the captureparticles along with their toxic payload from the blood.The capture particles will have affinity molecules on theirsurface to preferentially bind to pathogens and toxins, andthe particles will at the same time have acoustic propertiesthat make rapid ultrasonic separation possible. All ofthese technologies have been demonstrated separately, sowe anticipate that putting them together can offer a newway to rapidly extract elements from blood, and hope thatit could ultimately enable a system for saving the lives ofseptic patients.Jason O. Fiering is a Senior Member of the Technical Staffin the Micro/Nano System Development group. His recentwork focuses on microfluidic systems for applicationsin drug delivery, cell separation, drug discovery, andmicrohydraulic actuation. He has led engineering teamson projects funded by DARPA, NIH, NASA, and theCIMIT consortium. Mr. Fiering holds seven patents andhas co-authored over forty peer-reviewed publications. Heearned his Bachelor’s degree at Wesleyan University andhis Master’s degree at Duke University, both in Physics.80 Excellence in Innovation Award