Dr. Loic Laplatine’s research is focused on industrial technology transfer of biosensing techniques for medicine and environmental monitoring. His research interests include silicon photonics, optical microscopy, microfluidics and instrumentation. His current work is geared toward the proof-of-concept of an inexpensive disposable cartridge biochips that can be analyzed by a portable readout device to simultaneously measure the concentration of multiple analytes within tiny samples of physiological fluids or water. This project funded by a 2-year MITACS Accelerate grant is a collaboration between the Bio-Medical Micro Devices laboratory and the Photonics Research laboratory at UBC, and Luxmux, an industrial partner in Calgary. He also works on BioMEMS which reproduce the physiological hypoxic conditions (i.e. oxygen level) found in real tumors on 3D cell spheroids grown in vitro. He is mainly focusing on experiments based on two-photon and confocal microscopy to quantitatively analyze the spheroids response over time.
In 2014, he defended a Ph. D. in instrumental development for Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) microscopy at CEA Grenoble, France. His research led to a ten-fold improvement in image quality compared with previous commercial or research-based devices. This project was led in collaboration with Horiba Jobin Yvon and Prestodiag and targeted applications in the health and food safety industries. In 2010, he defended a MSc in physics engineering at INSA Toulouse, France. His main project was the development of a new immobilization method to image yeasts and Aspergillus spores by Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France. He also worked on a novel label-free biosensing technique based on the diffraction of Moleculary Imprinted Polymer (MIP) in collaboration with Innopsys.