Potential Projects

A set of representative project possiblities are provided below. The first set is representative of challenges that have been discussed recently with HMS faculty. The second list provides general areas where there are likely to be needs, but have not yet come up in discussions with your colleagues. If you don’t see something like your situation please contact us anyway, chances are we didn’t think of it.

Results from Recent Discussions:

Laboratory Automation and High Throughput

  • Develop equipment to deposit 500µm beads in each well of 1536 well plates.
  • Develop a process and the equipment to uniquely label beads used in high throughput screening.
  • Develop a process and the equipment for high throughput protein expression.

Need for new and improved measurement capabilities

  • Develop a high throughput method to determine the solubility of a protein before use in an X-ray crystallography experiment.
  • Develop an improved method of focusing X-rays.

Liquid Handling

  • Develop a kit to enable Immunoprecipitation to be done in a 96 well format, where the kit should be compatible with automated liquid handling equipment as well as manual execution.
  • Develop a new sample preparation and liquid handling system to enable a new high throughput discovery method.

Sample Preparation

  • Develop tools to simplify microinjection into Xenopus oocytes.

Data acquisition and processing

  • Develop an image capture system and analysis algorithm for gels.

Medical devices and Diagnostic products

  • Develop a new Cancer diagnostic device for prognostication and therapy selection.
  • Develop tools for use in a tissue engineering process.

 

Anticipated Challenges:

Laboratory Automation and High Throughput

  • Develop custom robotics
  • Develop tools and fixtures to expand the capabilities of existing robotics

Need for new and improved measurement capabilities

  • Protein analysis
  • Simultaneous detection of multiple analytes
  • Need for improved sensitivity

Liquid Handling

  • Novel applications of centrifugation for multi-component separations
  • Need for improved precision at microliter and nanoliter volumes

Sample Preparation

  • Tools to eliminate, or reduce, tedious sample preparation steps w/o requiring expensive robotics
  • Tools to simplify high manual dexterity procedures, enabling more researchers to perform the tasks

Data acquisition and processing

  • Image capture and digitization
  • Algorithm development and execution

Medical devices and Diagnostic products

  • Surgical tools
  • In vivo detection syste