Center for Live Cell Technology
What is Live Cell Technology?
While past research has focused on analyzing cells at a single fixed moment in time, live cell technology studies cell clusters as they live, grow, and develop. This is an entirely new way of researching cell growth and change enabled by advances in technology, many of which have been developed right here at UC Santa Cruz.
Studying complex three-dimensional cell cultures as they grow will allow us to better understand where and how mutations impact human tissue function and cause disease.
Live Cell Technology at UC Santa Cruz
At UC Santa Cruz, our goal is to use our strengths in open-source software development to apply lessons learned from the computer revolution to the life sciences. We believe that allowing scientists to contribute to open-source projects around the world can have life-changing effects.
Our program focuses on bringing together three critical areas for meaningful change:
Technology
We are developing automated, inexpensive devices that can be controlled remotely from multiple locations and devices. We are digitizing the wet lab to automate routine tasks, improve precision, and speed discovery.
Our new dedicated sequencing center will allow us to achieve while-you-wait DNA sequencing for clinical use and improved diagnosis and pathogen tracking.
Disease Research
We are growing organoids, tiny cell clusters that will allow us to study human cells over long periods of time. These organoids can speed the development of effective pharmaceuticals and therapeutics by allowing studies that were previously performed on animals to be scaled up and conducted on human cells.
Our current focuses are on neurological disorders and pediatric cancers.
Education
Our remote technologies offer an opportunity to transform science education by broadening who is able to participate in advanced scientific experiments. We are partnering with a local high school to bring this technology to underserved classrooms, and have made it open-source so it can be used around the globe.
Affiliated Labs and Working groups
This interdisciplinary research requires coordination from labs across campus. Current labs involved in this project include: