Publications by authors named "Evelyn Kendall Williams"

Neutropenia is a condition comprising an abnormally low number of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell, which puts patients at an increased risk of severe infections. Neutropenia is especially common among cancer patients and can disrupt their treatment or even be life-threatening in severe cases. Therefore, routine monitoring of neutrophil counts is crucial.

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Article Synopsis
  • Deep-ultraviolet microscopy is a new approach for high-resolution, label-free molecular imaging that can quickly analyze blood at the point-of-care.
  • The researchers developed a smaller, more affordable deep-UV microscope system using inexpensive optics and components, which contrasts with the previous bulky and costly setups.
  • This compact system can accurately scan and analyze blood smears for hemoglobin content and white blood cells, and it is about 10 times cheaper than previous versions, making it suitable for wider applications in biomedicine.
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Human mesenchymal stromal cells (hMSCs) are a promising source for regenerative cell therapy. However, hMSC clinical use has been stymied by product variability across hMSC donors and manufacturing practices resulting in inconsistent clinical outcomes. The inability to predict hMSC clinical efficacy, or potency, is a major limitation for market penetration.

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Neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) is an antimicrobial cobweb-structured material produced by immune cells for clearance of pathogens in the body, but paradoxically associated with biofilm formation and exacerbated lung infections. To provide a better materials perspective on the pleiotropic roles played by NETs at diverse compositions/concentrations, a NETs-like material (called 'microwebs', abbreviated as μwebs) is synthesized for decoding the antimicrobial activity of NETs against in infection-relevant conditions. We show that μwebs composed of low-to-intermediate concentrations of DNA-histone complexes successfully trap and inhibit growth and biofilm formation.

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Diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) is an optical modality used to measure an index of blood flow in biological tissue. This blood flow index depends on both the red blood cell flow rate and density (i.e.

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Epithelial tissues mechanically deform the surrounding extracellular matrix during embryonic development, wound repair, and tumor invasion. Ex vivo measurements of such multicellular tractions within three-dimensional (3D) biomaterials could elucidate collective dissemination during disease progression and enable preclinical testing of targeted antimigration therapies. However, past 3D traction measurements have been low throughput due to the challenges of imaging and analyzing information-rich 3D material deformations.

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Human mesenchymal stromal cells (hMSCs) are a promising cell source for numerous regenerative medicine and cell therapy-based applications. However, MSC-based therapies have faced challenges in translation to the clinic, in part due to the lack of sufficient technologies that accurately predict MSC potency and are viable in the context of cell manufacturing. Microfluidic platforms may provide an innovative opportunity to address these challenges by enabling multiparameter analyses of small sample sizes in a high throughput and cost-effective manner, and may provide a more predictive environment in which to analyze hMSC potency.

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In addition to the classical biological and biochemical framework, blood clots can also be considered as active biomaterials composed of dynamically contracting platelets, nascent polymeric fibrin that functions as a matrix scaffold, and entrapped blood cells. As platelets sense, rearrange, and apply forces to the surrounding microenvironment, they dramatically change the material properties of the nascent clot, increasing its stiffness by an order of magnitude. Hence, the mechanical properties of blood clots are intricately tied to the forces applied by individual platelets.

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Single cells respond heterogeneously to biochemical treatments, which can complicate the analysis of in vitro and in vivo experiments. In particular, stressful perturbations may induce the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), a transformation through which compact, sensitive cells adopt an elongated, resistant phenotype. However, classical biochemical measurements based on population averages over large numbers cannot resolve single cell heterogeneity and plasticity.

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Textured surfaces with periodic topographical features and long-range order are highly attractive for directing cell-material interactions. They mimic physiological environments more accurately than planar surfaces and can fundamentally alter cell alignment, shape, gene expression, and cellular assembly into superstructures or microtissues. Here we demonstrate for the first time that wrinkled graphene-based surfaces are suitable as textured cell attachment substrates, and that engineered wrinkling can dramatically alter cell alignment and morphology.

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