Repetitive, manual tasks are an inevitability in managing daily operations in a research setting. But the more time researchers spend on basic maintenance, the less time they have to do cutting-edge research.

Third-year students at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) worked with the Harvard Stem Cell Institute iPS Core Facility last fall to design a pair of solutions to reduce the time spent on day-to-day operations. They created an automated task management and scheduling system called WorkFlow, and a semi-robotic cell imaging system called CytoScope. The students presented their designs as their final project for ES96: Engineering Problem Solving and Design Project, a core course for third-year SEAS students pursuing S.B. engineering degrees. This section was taught by David Mooney, Robert P. Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering.

This was the best design project Ive ever been part of, said project co-lead Ryan Link, a mechanical engineering concentrator. We started from scratch, didnt know what wed have at the end. It was this whole design process: start from literally a blank piece of paper, create each piece, go through and solve problems along the way, and build something in the end.

The iPS Core Facility derives and distributes induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs). Unlike embryonic stem cells, IPSCs can be taken from adults and start off as cells that have already differentiated into a specific use, such as kidney or heart cells. The cells can then be regressed into stem cells, which can differentiate into a new function.

I could walk up to an adult, take some cells, turn them into stem cells and use them to recreate their kidney or liver, Link said.

Because IPSCs can be taken from adults, they have the potential to enable stem cell research without the ethical and political issues associated with embryonic stem cells.

As bioengineers, a lot of the stuff that we research has ethical concerns in mind, said Aaron Zheng, a bioengineering concentrator and project co-lead. So, it was very interesting for us to work on this project to further a field that has a lot of scientific implications without the preexisting ethical implications.

The iPS Core Facility challenged the 13 ES96 students to identify ways to improve productivity and operations in the lab. That led to a full month of background research and interviews to identify the most-pressing needs.

We spent a month deriving a one-sentence problem statement, which is what we framed the rest of the semester around, Zheng said. It was about what our client needed the most, what their biggest challenges were, and what solution would best address that problem.

The students then brainstormed potential solutions, slowly whittling down the list based on factors that included cost of materials, level of impact, and feasibility of delivery by the end of the semester.

The students worked hard, demonstrated significant creativity and ingenuity, and I think really learned how to work as a team on a complex, multicomponent project, Mooney said. The Teaching Fellows, Shawn Kang and Kyle Ruark, and Active Learning Labs staff Melissa Hancock and Avery Normandin provided access to critical resources and important training, and the students worked closely with the iPS Core Facility Director Dr. Laurence Daheron to both identify the key issues and develop solutions.

As a problem statement, the students decided the facilitys biggest need was to improve the inefficiencies in its monitoring technology and process of culturing sample cells. The CytoScope addresses those inefficiencies by automating the imaging process for stem cell plates stored overnight in incubators.

When researchers would check on the IPSCs every morning, theyd have to take them out, put them under a microscope, examine them by hand and try to determine what was going on, Link said. Theyd have to do that for every cell plate or cell well, which means a lot of manual labor for a pretty simple task. Our idea was to create a system inside the incubator that could image the cells autonomously overnight, and the researchers could just look at the images in the morning without having to do all these extra steps.

WorkFlow is a software system that combines calendar, messaging, spreadsheet and task-management programs, making it easier for researchers to track what their colleagues are doing and when. Both final products stressed the importance of feasibility, of designing engineering solutions that can be delivered to a client by a specific date.

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Improving stem cell research - Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences