Our paper "Diffusive Molecular Communication with a Spheroidal Receiver for Organ-on-Chip Systems" was accepted for presentation at IEEE ICC this May in Rome, Italy. This paper will be our group's first publication focused on organ-on-chip systems. We model an organoid of cells as a receiver and derive the channel response from a nearby point transmitter. We approximate the porous organoid receiver as a sphere with a lower diffusion coefficient and show its impact on the received signal. This paper was co-authored with Hamidreza Arjmandi and Mitra Rezaei from our group, in addition to Mohamad Zoofaghari (Yazd University, Iran) and our SIMBA project collaborators at AstraZeneca Sweden (Kajsa Kanebratt, Liisa Vilen, David Janzen, and Peter Gennemark).

We're pleased to announce that we will be hosting the 10th ACM International Conference on Nanoscale Computing and Communication (ACM NanoCom) here at the University of Warwick. The conference will be held from 20-22 September, 2023. Adam Noel is serving as General Chair along with Andrew Eckford (York University, Canada). Other local organisers include Hamidreza Arjmandi as Local Organization Chair, Matthew Higgins as Sponsorship Chair, and Yanahan Paramalingam as Social Media Chair.

ACM NanoCom 2023 is endorsed by the Technical Committee on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications of the IEEE Communications Society.

The Call for Papers is now available. Full details can be found here. The initial deadline for Regular Papers is 9 April 2023.

We're pleased to welcome Dr Ibrahim Isik who joins us as a Visiting Research Fellow to work on fluid dynamics and signal transport for bacteria. Ibrahim has a B.Sc. in Electrical Electronics Engineering from the University of Gaziantep, Turkey, and both an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Electronics Engineering from Inonu University, Turkey. His Ph.D. research was on the impact of amyloid beta on molecular communication.

We're pleased to welcome Mitra Rezaei who joins us with a Chancellor's International Scholarship to do her PhD on communication between cell organoids. Mitra has a B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Sahand University of Technology and an M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Tarbiat Modares University.

Our paper "Membrane Fusion-Based Transmitter Design for Static and Diffusive Mobile Molecular Communication Systems" (alternative arXiv link) was accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Communications. This paper considers a novel molecular communication system where the transmitter is a membrane-bound sphere and vesicles bind to and fuse with the sphere in order to release molecules into the propagation environment. Such a system is more reflective of cellular signalling than the point- or volume-based transmitters that are usually modelled. We derive the resulting molecule release probability and the corresponding impact on what is observed at an absorbing receiver. Our simulation results show how the hitting probability at the receiver is impacted by slow vesicle diffusion or a low membrane fusion probability. The paper was co-authored with Xinyu Huang (Australian National University), Yuting Fang (Melbourne, Australia), and Nan Yang (Australian National University).

We're pleased to welcome the new research members that have joined the BioPhysComm Lab this year.

Dr Hamidreza Arjmandi joins us as a Research Fellow to work on the SIMBA Project (Signal Propagation and Information in Microscale Biological Applications). Dr Arjmandi was previously an Assistant Professor at Yazd University, Iran, and an ERCIM Postdoctoral Fellow at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology (Tehran, Iran) in 2016.

 Dr Hamidreza Arjmandi

We're also pleased to welcome 2 new PhD students: Yanahan Paramalingam and Mahir Taher. Yanahan is co-supervised by Freya Harrison and Tara Schiller, and is studying signalling within biofilms. Mahir joins us as a member of the Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research PhD Program. He is co-supervised by Anne Straube and is studying molecular transport in neurons.

 Yanahan Paramalingam

 Mahir Taher

We have a 2-year postdoctoral position for a Research Fellow to work on the EPSRC project "Signal Propagation and Information in Microscale Biological Applications (SIMBA). This project includes collaboration with Dr Christophe Corre in the School of Life Sciences and with AstraZeneca. Applications close 22 June 2021 and can be made here.

Our paper "Membrane Fusion-Based Transmitter Design for Static and Diffusive Mobile Molecular Communication Systems" has been posted to arXiv. This paper considers a novel molecular communication system where the transmitter is a membrane-bound sphere and vesicles bind to and fuse with the sphere in order to release molecules into the propagation environment. Such a system is more reflective of cellular signalling than the point- or volume-based transmitters that are usually modelled. We derive the resulting molecule release probability and the corresponding impact on what is observed at an absorbing receiver. Our simulation results show how the hitting probability at the receiver is impacted by slow vesicle diffusion or a low membrane fusion probability. The paper was co-authored with Xinyu Huang (Australian National University), Yuting Fang (Melbourne, Australia), and Nan Yang (Australian National University).

We have successfully received funding for the project "Signal Propagation and Information in Microscale Biological Applications (SIMBA)," which has been granted by the EPSRC as a New Investigator Award at a value of £313k (£392k FEC). This will be a 30-month project starting in Spring 2021 and it will establish a communications engineering framework for describing and controlling cell signalling, behaviour, and decision-making. The framework will be applied to interdisciplinary case studies of bacteria signalling and organ-on-a-chip systems. The bacteria case study will model the emergence of antimicrobial resistance in an environment with different mutants of the S. coelicolor bacterium. The organ-on-a-chip case study will model metabolic regulation between liver and pancreatic cells, as observed in an experimental microfluidic platform. The project team includes Adam Noel as PI, Christophe Corre (Department of Chemistry and School of Life Sciences) as Co-I, and AstraZeneca as an industrial partner. We will also be hiring a postdoctoral research assistant for a 2-year term.