Kun Li obtained his Bachelor(2013), Master (2015),and PhD (2020) of mechanical engineering from Southeast University in China. His PhD research was on desalination, and behaviour of ions in nano-confinement. He has been a visiting PhD student at Brown University for 2 years studying on pressure-retarded DNA translocations of nanopores and the nanoscale stagnant fluid layers of biomolecules. His research interests include solid-state nanopore sensor, virus characterization and imaging, nanofabrication and nanofluidics.

‍

In CAMP, Kun Li is working on Nanopore Fingerprinting of Viruses in Cell Therapeutics. The motivation of the project is the needs of both broad spectrum and rapid label-free sterility testing methods for cell therapy manufacturing. We designed a nanopore tomography specific to a desired microbe library for cell therapeutics, because microbes passing through nanopores have distinct current traces due to their morphology, surface properties, and mechanical properties.The innovation is that we are the first to propose to extrude and drive viruses or exosome through a nanopore to characterize the mechanical properties. The deformation of a virus capsid is related to the elastic constant of the shell, and also related to the elasticity and viscosity of the internal materials.Therefore, we can obtain the maturity and infectivity of the virus, and can also evaluate the internal genomic content. Our work will not only impact on the cell therapy industry by rapid and broad-spectrum virus fingerprinting, but also bring benefits to virology, early cancer diagnosis by characterizing exosome stiffness, and the characterization of filled and empty capsids for AAV production.