Reactive Inkjet Printing of Functional Swimmers

Production of small-scale devices that can autonomously generate thrust via catalytic reactions within fluidic environments has become an increasingly active field and has led to a focus on potential applications including environmental monitoring and remediation, in vivo drug delivery and repair, and lab on a chip diagnostics.

We have recently fabricated enzyme powered silk micro-rockets that can swim in bio fluid, which have attracted considerable media attention. This PhD project is to extend our recent work on 3D inkjet printing of silk swimmers, exploring the fabrication of 3D silk swimmers with well-defined structures and compositions using reactive inkjet printing technology. The fabricated swimmers will be used for rare cell (e.g. circulating tumour cell) capture or environmental monitoring. The student will be trained to use modern techniques such as 3D reactive inkjet printing, AFM, SEM, TEM, interferometry, FTIR, CD etc. to fabricate the micro swimmers and characterize their properties (e.g. velocity and trajectory). A combination of relevant cell assays will also be carried out to evaluate the biocompatibility and biological functions of the swimmers (e.g. CTC cell capture).