The Laboratory
The Bio Engineering Laboratory (BEL) was established in 2008 at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) of ETH Zurich in Basel.
BEL emerged from the Physical Electronics Laboratory (PEL) that had been domiciled in the Department of Physics of ETH Zürich and was dissolved in 2008.
BEL is rooted in Engineering and Physics and is performing interdisciplinary research and education relevant to biology and medicine. Our group has longstanding experience in the development of CMOS-based integrated chemical and biomicrosystems, as well as bioelectronics and microelectrode arrays. Moreover, we are engaged in the development of microfluidics for investigating the characteristics of single cells and microtissues.
Research Rationale
Bringing together microtechnology and specifically microelectronics, one of the currently most powerful technologies, with biology and medicine offers very attractive prospects and unprecedented advantages:
- Microstructures and microfluidic elements can be used to handle and investigate single cells and microtissues.
- Multitudes of microtransducers can be connected to recording systems, as the connectivity problem is overcome by using integrated addressing schemes.
- Transducers can be miniaturized while signal quality is preserved, as the signals can be electronically conditioned right at the site of generation.