Engineering and characterization of gymnosperm sapwood toward enabling the design of water filtration devices.

Naturally-occurring membranes in the xylem tissue of gymnosperm sapwood enable its use as an abundantly-available material to construct filters, with potential to facilitate access to safe drinking water in resource-constrained settings. However, the material's behavior as a filter is poorly understood, and challenges such as short shelf life have not been addressed. Here, we characterize the operational attributes of xylem filters and show that the material exhibits a highly non-linear dependence of flow resistance on thickness upon drying, and a tendency for self-blocking. We develop guidelines for the design and fabrication of xylem filters, demonstrate gravity-operated filters with shelf life >2 years, and show that the filters can provide >3 log removal of E. coli, MS-2 phage, and rotavirus from synthetic test waters and coliform bacteria from contaminated spring, tap, and ground waters. Through interviews and workshops in India, we use a user-centric approach to design a prototype filtration device with daily- to weekly-replaceable xylem filters, and uncover indicators of social acceptance of xylem as a natural water filter. Our work enhances the understanding of xylem as a filtration material, and opens opportunities for engineering a diverse range of low-cost, biodegradable xylem-based filtration products on a global scale.

Antibody-modified conduits for highly selective cytokine elimination from blood.

Cytokines play an important role in dysregulated immune responses to infection, pancreatitis, ischemia/reperfusion injury, burns, hemorrhage, cardiopulmonary bypass, trauma, and many other diseases. Moreover, the imbalance between inflammatory and antiinflammatory cytokines can have deleterious effects. Here, we demonstrated highly selective blood-filtering devices - antibody-modified conduits (AMCs) - that selectively eliminate multiple specific deleterious cytokines in vitro. AMCs functionalized with antibodies against human vascular endothelial growth factor A or tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α) selectively eliminated the target cytokines from human blood in vitro and maintained them in reduced states even in the face of ongoing infusion at supraphysiologic rates. We characterized the variables that determine AMC performance, using anti-human TNF-α AMCs to eliminate recombinant human TNF-α. Finally, we demonstrated selective cytokine elimination in vivo by filtering interleukin 1 ß from rats with lipopolysaccharide-induced hypercytokinemia.

Identi-wheez - A device for in-home diagnosis of asthma.

Asthma is the most common chronic illness among children. The skills required to diagnose it make it an even greater concern. In this work, we present a child-friendly wearable device, which allows in-home diagnosis of asthma. The device acquires simultaneous measurements from multiple stethoscopes. The recordings are then sent to a specialist who uses assistive diagnosis algorithms that enable auscultation (listening to lung sounds with a stethoscope) at any location in the lungs volume by sound refocusing. The specialist is also presented with a sound "heat map" which shows the location of sound sources in the lungs. We present design considerations of our device, as well as the algorithms for assistive diagnosis and their analysis which demonstrate reduction of ambient and measurement noise by over 10dB.