The ARTORG Organs-on-Chip Technologies Lab teaches the following lecture in the frame of the Master of Biomedical Sciences Program and the Master for Biomedical Engineering of the University of Bern:
BioMEMS Lectures (Bio-Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems). This introductory course intended for biologists gives the students an overview of the current technologies and the fundamental principles used in the "lab-on-a-chip" and the "cells-on-a-chip" fields. Scaling laws, microfluidics, electrokinetic effects, DNA and proteins microarrays, as well as organs-on-chip are topics dicussed during the course.
BioMicrofluidics Lectures. The Biomicrofluidics course is intended for biomedical engineers and has for objectives to present microfluidic phenomenon that take place at the nano- and microscale, such as surface tension, electrokinetic effects, molecular diffusion. A large part of the course will focus on advanced microfluidic systems, in which cells can be trapped, cultured, lysed and analyzed. At the end of the course, the students should be able to design, and know how to fabricate simple microfluidic systems, based on physical, technological, material, biological and economic constraints.
Introduction to Biomechanics. The Introduction to Biomechanics course covers the musculoskeletal, cardiovascular and respiratory systems; my contribution deals with the mechanics of cells and tissues. It introduces the viscoelastic behaviour of soft biological materials and how it is measured, lung micromechanics and the deformation of tissue during breathing, the architecture of the cell as a prestressed structure, the mechanical dialogue between cells and the extracellular matrix, and a simple model of mechanotransduction. At the end of these lectures, the students should be able to reason quantitatively about the mechanical environment of a cell, and to explain how a tissue and the cells within it change one another’s properties, using pulmonary fibrosis as the worked example.
