Mohammad Baz receives an Award of Excellence for his poster at the MSB2023

Mohammad Baz, PhD student within the MILE team of LAAS-CNRS, has received an Award of Excellence for his poster presented at the 39^th International Symposium on Microscale Separations and Bioanalysis (MSB2023), held May 21-24, 2023 in Tallahassee, Florida (USA).

©MILE/LAAS-CNRS

Mohammad was rewarded for his work "Lab-on-a-chip for Isolating Circulating Adipose Stromal Cells: Pre-processing Module", directed by Anne-Marie Gué (MILE team, LAAS-CNRS) and Coralie Sengenès (Stromagics team, RESTORE). His thesis work was carried out as part of a project co-funded by the ANR ASCfinder and a Occitanie region/Toulouse Univertsity grant, involving 2 laboratories: LAAS-CNRS and RESTORE.

Mohammad was one of over 80 speakers at the conference, where he presented a microdevice for the pre-concentration of Adipose Stromal Cells (ASC) from native blood. This size-separation concept, based on hydrodynamic filtration, enables over 99% of red blood cells to be filtered without clogging or obstructing microfluidic tubing.
In his work, he demonstrated the ability of this device to sort undiluted native blood with a relatively short experimental time and a 100% recovery rate of cells of interest present in low concentration. This filtration method proves to be highly competitive with standard blood separation methods (lysis and centrifugation), without generating stress on blood cells and yet remaining highly effective in pre-concentrating ASCs from murine models. These promising results are a step towards the complete isolation of these ASCs, which will then be carried out using a magnetophoresis device.