Bio

 

Yingchao received his B.Sc. degree in Thermal Energy and Power Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology in July 2016 with his research focused on the electrical propulsion systems, especially on cusped field thruster and Hall effect thruster. Subsequently, in July 2018 he obtained his M.Sc. degree in Nuclear Science and Technology from Tsinghua University, during which he mainly studied on the generation of carbonaceous dust formed via chemical vapor deposition in high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactor. After that, in September 2018 he joined the Prof. Andrew deMello’s group as a PhD student. Now, his research interests mainly lie in the extracellular vesicles separation and rare cells enrichment by either passive (inertia, viscosity, etc.) or active sorting (pneumatic valve, electric field etc.) in microfluidics.

 

Research Interests

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Extracellular Vesicles Separation

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Extracellular vesicles (EVs), including apoptotic bodies, microvesicles and exosomes, is a kind of lipid-based vector which contains nucleic acids and proteins for intracellular communication, demonstrating great potential for early disease detection and therapeutic drug delivery systems. Traditional separation methods, e.g. differential centrifugation and ultrafiltration, are time-consuming and labor-intensive and suffer from low sample purity or low sample yield. Towards this end, I am working on developing novel and simple microfluidic systems for isolation of EVs based on their size. Downstream analysis, e.g. western blot and sequencing, will be employed, hopefully providing an easy-operating way for early detection of cancer.

 

Rare Cells Enrichment

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Rare cells sorting is important for single cell analysis and disease diagnosis. However, these cells, like circulating tumor cells (CTCs), usually present at very low levels (around 1~10 CTCs per milliliter), which challenges the current benchtop fluorescence-activated cell sorting systems. For this project, I am interested in developing a high throughput microfluidic flow cytometer for CTCs enrichment, the goal of which is to provide a pre-sorting strategy which can enrich the CTCs concentration to a large extent in quite a short time with high accuracy before downstream analysis.

 

Links

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Google Scholar

ResearchGate

 

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