Dr. Demirci's laboratory specializes in applying micro- and nano-scale technologies to problems in medicine. They have been focusing on three major problems.

(i) Global Health: More than 35 million HIV-infected people live in the developing world, where resources are scarce. They have been developing low-cost diagnostic devices for global health problems, such as counting CD4+ T lymphocytes in HIV infected patients at resource limited settings. The absolute number of CD4+ T lymphocytes in blood is vital for evaluating HIV-infected patients and has important prognostic and therapeutic implications. Currently, these values are obtained through using a flow cytometer, which is a very expensive method. Moreover, They aim to develop technologies to capture various cell types from blood using nanoparticles, and microscale technologies.

(ii) Tissue Engineering: Dr. Demirci's lab appies acoustic wave expertise to create picoliter-sized droplets that encapsulate single cells. Their objective is to develop technology to print these droplets for cell-by-cell 3-dimensional tissue generation.

(iii) Microfluidics for Cryopreservation: Cell encapsulating droplets have medical applications including single to few cell cryopreservation. They have demonstrated that they can vitrify cells encapsulated in cryoprotectant droplets. This creates a new regime for biopreservation using cell encapsulating droplets. Being able to vitrify at low cryoprotectant concentrations decreases the possible osmotic shock to cells and cytotoxicity levels within the cell.

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