Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/S85443/01
Title:	Dielectrophoretic Well Plate Technology for Cell based High Throughput Assays
Principal Investigator:	Hughes, Professor MP
Other Investigators:	Ogin, Professor SL Kass, Professor GE
Researcher Co-Investigators:	Dr KF Hoettges
Project Partners:
Department:	Ctr for Biomedical Engineering
Organisation:	University of Surrey
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 October 2004	Ends:	30 September 2007	Value (£):	208,181
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Analytical Science Cells Medical science & disease
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
At present, one of the key technologies in high throughput drug assaying is multi-well plates that can perform a large number of experiments in parallel. For cell-based high throughput screening, a model organism is placed in all wells, while a different drug candidate is added to each single well. By means of a marker such as p indicators or fluorescence markers it is established if a candidate interacted with the model organism in the desired way. One problem is to find suitable assay markers that do not interact with the model organism themselves. A method that avoids the use of chemical makers is dielectrophoresis (DEP). DEP is the induced motion of particles in non-uniform electric fields, which can be readily applied to the separation and analysis of cellular and viral particles and as an assay to assess interactions of drugs with bacteria or cells, and detect changes in the cell wall, cell membrane or cytoplasm. Whereas previous DEP studies have used electric fields generated by planar electrodes etched from metallic films, a novel electrode structure for DEP has been developed at Surrey, for which a patent has recently been filed. The new technology (DEP-Well) uses a conductor/composite laminate to achieve electrodes with similar dimensions to conventional electrodes, but which can be structured along the surface of a hollow cylinder. Furthermore, DEP-Wells can be constructed on plates with dimensions similar to those of standard well-plates. We propose to use DEP-Well technology in this project to develop multi-well plates with integrated electrodes to combine the use of DEP with multi-well plate technology for high-throughput screening applications.
Key Findings
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Organisation Website:	http://www.surrey.ac.uk