BME7900 Seminar Series - Leslie Chan, PhD

Description

For our next seminar speaker, we welcome Dr. Leslie Chan. Dr. Chan is an Assistant Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Harnessing In Vivo Enzymatic Activity to Engineer Synthetic Breath Biomarkers of Disease

Abstract: Breath testing is a non-invasive and rapid diagnostic tool that is underutilized in the clinic due to scarcity of known breath biomarkers. Thousands of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are expelled from the body in breath after their endogenous production or after their introduction from exogenous sources such as our diet or the environment. However, efforts to identify disease-specific VOCs have been hindered by limitations with currently-used -omic approaches. As an alternative approach to breath biomarker discovery, we are developing methods to engineer breath biomarkers that leverage aberrant enzyme activity in the diseased tissue microenvironment and enzyme-responsive nanomaterials. In this talk, I will discuss our diagnostic platform, which consists of nanoparticle sensors that are delivered in vivo and release volatile reporters upon activation by disease-associated enzymatic activity. VOC trafficking pathways from tissues to breath offers a mechanism by which we can engineer exhaled biomarkers for diseases of different organ systems. I will discuss how we designed and validated our volatile-releasing nanosensors for use in respiratory disease and future applications in gastrointestinal disease.

Bio: Dr. Leslie Chan is an Assistant Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Tech School of Engineering and Emory School of Medicine. Dr. Chan earned her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Tech and her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Washington with Professor Suzie Pun. She completed her postdoctoral training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professor Sangeeta Bhatia and is a recipient of an NIH K99/R00 award. Dr. Chan’s research program uses emerging principles from nanomedicine to develop technologies to study, detect, and treat infectious disease, microbiome dysbiosis, and inflammatory diseases.