“Lab on a Chip” Mimics Brain Chemistry
Johns Hopkins researchers from the Whiting School of Engineering and the School of Medicine have devised a micro-scale tool – a lab on a chip – designed to mimic the chemical complexities of the brain. The system should help scientists better understand how nerve cells in the brain work together to form the nervous system.
A report on the work appears as the cover story in the February 2008 issue of the British journal Lab on a Chip.
“The chip we’ve developed will make experiments on nerve cells more simple to conduct and to control,” says Andre Levchenko, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and faculty affiliate of the Institute for NanoBioTechnology.