School of Engineering Research Seminar with Dr. Marlon S. Thomas

Biosensor and Clinical Assay Development: Fabricating the Tools for The Democratization of Diagnostic Medicine 

Marlon S. Thomas, Ph.D. 

Autonomous Medical Devices Incorporated, Los Angeles, California 

1-2 pm 

Thursday, January 14th, 2021 

Zoom meeting ID: 91445222704 

https://Fairfield.zoom.us/j/91445222704 

The democratization of personalized medicine will require that clinical assays be performed near or at the patient's bedside. Advances in electronic technology along with the emergence of nanotechnology has revolutionized the development and use of biosensors. In this research, biomedical microelectromechanical systems (BioMEMS) devices as biosensing tools to quantify biomarkers, pharmaceutical agents, bacterial pathogens, and viral particles in the blood, saliva, or urine at levels equal to standard laboratories are discussed. Various developments that have shown great promise include bioluminescence emission LAMP assays, low-cost protein microarrays for monitoring the body's immune responses, shear horizontal surface acoustic wave (SH-SW) biosensors to analyze exhaled breath samples rapidly, and the development of devices to evaluate the capture efficiency of chimeric antigen receptor T helper cells in vitro. These devices are designed to meet many of the requirements outline by the World Health Organization: affordable, sensitive, specific, user friendly, robust, rapid, equipment free and deliverable to the end user. 

Biosketch: Dr. Thomas earned a BS degree from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in Chemistry with specialization in Bio-analytical chemistry. After working as a Bio-analytical chemist at DuPont for two years, he then attended Drexel University and received an MS degree in Biomedical Engineering. He received a second MS degree in Chemical engineering from the University of California, Irvine with his research at the Beckman LASER Institute and the Department of Biophysics. He went on to receive a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Riverside. He previously held faculty positions at Florida A&M University and at Wichita State University. Dr. Marlon Thomas joined the Autonomous Medical Devices, Incorporated (AMDI) as the Clinical Assay Development Laboratory Manager in 2015.