Laser Machined Fiber-Based Microprobe: Application in Microscale Electroporation

Jongwoon Kim; Yajun Zhao; Shuo Yang; Ziang Feng; Anbo Wang; Rafael V. Davalos; Xiaoting Jia

doi:10.1007/s42765-022-00148-5

Advanced Fiber Materials ›› 2022, Vol. 4 ›› Issue (4) : 859 -872. DOI: 10.1007/s42765-022-00148-5

Research Article

Laser Machined Fiber-Based Microprobe: Application in Microscale Electroporation

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¹Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech, 24060, Blacksburg, VA, USA

²Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics, Virginia Tech, 24061, Blacksburg, VA, USA

^f davalos@vt.edu

^g xjia@vt.edu

Jongwoon Kim

received his B.A. degree in Physics at Ohio Wesleyan University (2015), B.S. and M.S. degree in Electrical Systems Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis (2018). He is currently a Ph. D. candidate in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. His research interests include multimaterial fibers and signal processing for biomedical applications.

Yajun Zhao

received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Chongqing University, China, in 2013 and 2018, respectively. He worked as a postdoctoral research assistant at Virginia Tech, from 2019 to 2021. He is currently an Associate Professor with Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, China. His research interests include pulsed power technology, high voltage discharge plasma, and their applications in biomedicine.

Shuo Yang

is a postdoctoral research associate in the department of biomedical engineering in Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA, in 2020. His research interests include photoacoustic imaging and optical sensing.

Ziang Feng

is a postdoctoral research associate at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests include multi-material multi-functional fibers, fiber-optic sensors, and energy harvesting. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech (2020), M.Eng. in Optical Engineering and B.S. in Optical Information Science and Technology from Beijing Jiaotong University (2015 and 2012).

Anbo Wang

received the doctoral degree in optics from the Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China, in 1990. He subsequently joined the Fiber and Electro-Optics Research Center, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) as a Staff Member to continue his research in fiber sensors. He was appointed as an Assistant Professor with the same Department in 1994 and was promoted to Associate Professor and then Professor in 1997 and 1999, respectively. He is the Founding Director of the Center for Photonics Technology. He is the author of 350 journal and conference papers and 25 U.S. and international patents in the field of fiber optics and sensors. Dr. Wang has supervised more than 100 graduate students and postdocs during his tenure at Virginia Tech and currently holds the Clayton Ayre Professorship. He is a SPIE Fellow.

Rafael V. Davalos

is an Endowed Professor in the Virginia Tech - Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences. He is also Director of Virginia Tech's Center for Engineered Health and a Program Leader of Wake Forest's Comprehensive Cancer Center. His research interests are in microfluidics for personalized medicine and developing technologies for cancer therapy. Davalos has authored 138 peer-reviewed articles and has 37 issued patents. He has been a plenary speaker for several prestigious venues including the International Symposium of the Bioelectrochemistry Society, the World Congress on Electroporation, and the Society of Cryobiology Annual Meeting. Davalos is an ASME and AIMBE Fellow and recipient of the 2021 ASME Van C. Mow Medal. Dr. Davalos received his bachelor’s from Cornell and doctorate from Berkeley.

Xiaoting Jia

is an assistant professor in the ECE department at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on multimaterial fibers for biomedical and wearable applications. Before joining Virginia Tech, she was a postdoc associate in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. She received her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT (2011), M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stony Brook University (2006), and B.S. in Materials Science from Fudan University in China (2004). She has published over 40 journal articles, with a total citation of over 14,000 times. She is a recipient of NSF CAREER award, 3 M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, ICTAS Junior Faculty Award at Virginia Tech, and the Translational Fellow at MIT.

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Abstract

Microscale electroporation devices are mostly restricted to in vitro experiments (i.e., microchannel and microcapillary). Novel fiber-based microprobes enable in vivo microscale electroporation and arbitrarily select the cell groups of interest to electroporate. We developed a flexible, fiber-based microscale electroporation device through a thermal drawing process and femtosecond laser micromachining techniques. The fiber consists of four copper electrodes (80 μm), one microfluidic channel (30 μm), and has an overall diameter of 400 μm. The dimensions of the exposed electrodes and channel were customizable through a delicate femtosecond laser setup. The feasibility of the fiber probe was validated through numerical simulations and in vitro experiments. Successful reversible and irreversible microscale electroporation was observed in a 3D collagen scaffold (seeded with U251 human glioma cells) using fluorescent staining. The ablation regions were estimated by performing the covariance error ellipse method and compared with the numerical simulations. The computational and experimental results of the working fiber-based microprobe suggest the feasibility of in vivo microscale electroporation in space-sensitive areas, such as the deep brain.

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Jongwoon Kim, Yajun Zhao, Shuo Yang, Ziang Feng, Anbo Wang, Rafael V. Davalos, Xiaoting Jia. Laser Machined Fiber-Based Microprobe: Application in Microscale Electroporation. Advanced Fiber Materials, 2022, 4(4): 859-872 DOI:10.1007/s42765-022-00148-5