Innovation Ambassador: Jason Gleghorn

Editor's note: The University of Delaware is diligently working to enhance infrastructure and support available to campus innovators. As part of this effort, the U.S. National Science Foundation's Accelerating Research Translation program (NSF ART program) at UD is investing in capacity-building resources to boost the translation of UD research discoveries into novel technologies of benefit to Delawareans and the nation. UD is an inaugural member of the NSF ART program.

It takes about a decade and a lot of money to bring a new drug to market-between $1 billion to $2 billion, in fact.

University of Delaware inventor Jason Gleghorn wants to change that.

At UD, Gleghorn is developing leading-edge microfluidic tissue models. The devices are about the size of two postage stamps, and they offer a faster, less-expensive way to study disease and to develop pharmaceutical targets.

These aren't tools he wants to keep just for himself. No, Gleghorn wants to put the patented technology he's developing in the hands of other experts, to advance clinical solutions in women's health, maternal-fetal health and pre-term birth. His work also has the potential to improve understanding of drug transport in the female reproductive tract, placenta, lung and lymph nodes.

Gleghorn, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, was named to the first cohort of Innovation Ambassadors at UD, as part of the University's effort to foster and support an innovation culture on campus. Below, he shares some of what he's learned about translating research to society.

Q: What is the problem that you are trying to address?

Gleghorn: A lot of disease has to do with disorganization in the body's normal tissue structure. My lab makes microfluidic tissue models, called organ-on-a-chip models, that have super-tiny channels about the thickness of a human hair, where we can introduce very small amounts of liquid, including cells, to represent an organ in the human body. This can help us study and understand the mechanism of how things work in the body (the biology) or help us do things like drug screening to test therapeutic compounds for treating disease.

And while these little microfluidic devices can do promising things, the infrastructure required to make the system work often restricts their use to high-end labs. We want to democratize the techniques and technology so that nonexperts can use it. To achieve this, we changed the way we make these devices, so that they are compatible with standard manufacturing, which means we can scale them and create them much easier.