Jong Seok Park and Moez Karim Aziz won second place for the Best Live Demo Award at the 2016 IEEE Sensors Conference, held October 30-November 2 in Orlando, Florida. Park and Aziz are Ph.D. students in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where they are advised by ECE Assistant Professor Hua Wang. 

Park’s and Aziz’s paper, entitled “Live Demonstration: CMOS Multi-Modality Sensing Array for Drug Screening and Cell-Based Assays,” was led by the Georgia Tech Electronics and Microsystem (GEMS) Lab, and is based on a collaboration with labs led by Mark Styczynski, an associate professor in Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Hee Cheol Cho, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Joining Park and Aziz as coauthors on the paper are ECE Ph.D. student Taiyun Chi who is also advised by Wang; Amy Su, a Ph.D. student advised by Styczynski; and Andrew Zhao, Cho's former Ph.D. student. 

In this paper, the team presents a live demonstration of a CMOS multi-modality cellular biosensor array chip that can facilitate drug screening and cell-based assays. The multi-modality sensing functionality enables real-time measurements of multiple physiological parameters of biological cells and cell clusters, such as their electrical potential, impedance, optical opacity, and bioluminescent imaging.

Compared with existing single-modality sensors, the team's multi-modality sensor captures multi-physics cellular responses with a high spatiotemporal resolution, substantially expanding the capabilities of monitoring cellular states and understanding complex drug mechanistic effects. For the live demonstration, the team operated the CMOS sensor chip with testing various bio-samples, including on-chip cultured E. Coli bacteria colonies, to present its multi-modality sensing capability and clinical relevance.

The demo may be viewed at http://ieee-sensors2016.org/demos and is labeled as Demo 7. This work was sponsored by Semiconductor Research Corporation, the National Science Foundation, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, and the Office of Naval Research.