Zbigniew Brzózka (Warsaw University of Technology, Poland)
Speaker: Zbigniew Brzózka (Warsaw University of Technology, Poland)
Talk: Lab-on-a-Chip devices for long-term cell culture and anticancer drug activity evaluation
Time: Wednesday, 1st of July 2015, 11:30
Venue: Biotechnology Summer School 2015, Kadyny Folwark Hotel&SPA
Category: Invited lectures during Biotechnology Summer School
Zbigniew Brzózka, biographical note
Prof. Zbigniew Brzózka obtained his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry at the Warsaw University of Technology, studying mechanisms of transition metal cations by carboxylic acids. He was a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich in the middle 80’s, working on new membrane selective electrodes in Prof. W. Simon’s group supported by the Swiss National Science Fundation and by Orion Research, Inc. Then he came back to Department of Analytical Chemistry of Warsaw University of Technology and finished his Dr.Sc. in chemical sciences.
Within 1991 – 1993, he was working in postdoc position in Prof. D.N. Reinhoudt’s group (University of Twente), supported by the Royal Dutch Science Foundations (NWO, STW), by Priva and Sentron, Inc. He was involved in a number of projects on molecular recognition based on supramolecular chemistry and its application to chemical sensors (chemically modified field-effect transistors, membrane ion-selective electrodes, fibre-optic sensors) suitable for monitoring in clinical diagnostic and environmental protection. One of the most interesting topic was anion recognition (in nature, the selective complexation of anions takes place by hydrogen bonds) and his research was focused on a novel type of neutral anion receptors consisting of a combination of a Lewis acidic center and fragments involving hydrogen bonds.
Since 1998, he is tenured professor of bioanalytics in Faculty of Chemistry, Institute of Biotechnology, Department of Microbioanalytics and now heads the “Miniaturized analytical systems” team. His current research interests focus on miniaturized analytical systems (Lab-on-a-Chip) for monitoring of bioanalytes. Emphasis is now also being laid on the applications of polymer microfabrication technologies to microchemical analysis, i.e. the integrated microchips with optical and electrochemical detection principles dedicated to early diagnostics of genetic diseases as a novel approach to reliably diagnose patients, and protect them from mistaken diagnoses and disorder progress. Another field of interest of the partners will be the development of polymeric chips for human cell culture in unique, in vivo-mimicking microenvironment where studies of cellular growth and responses to external factors are conducted for drug screening and toxicology applications.
Zbigniew Brzózka has received Professor Subvention of The Foundation for Polish Science (2003-2006) and Wiktor Kemula Medal (Honour Award of Polish Society of Chemistry) (in 2010). Since September 2008, he is Dean of Faculty of Chemistry, Warsaw University of Technology.