Author Spotlight: Engineering Molecular Tools for Disease Detection and Imaging

The Heart Lab is engineering molecular and cellular tools to precisely track and control disease biology. We use special information about diseased tissues to inform the design of responsive detection, imaging, and treatment tools for heterogeneous disorders. Biofluids present a convenient opportunity for disease detection and assessment, but these are often limited by low quantities of relevant analytes.

As a result, much of the field is pursuing strategies to amplify disease associated signals to improve the sensitivity of diagnostic tests, like BCR and surface plasma on resonance. Rather than relying on endogenous disease biomarkers in circulation, our approach uses synthetic biomarkers to report disease activity when released from injected nanosensors. Our synthetic biomarkers are chemically stabilized DNA barcodes, which allow for multiple disease microenvironment signals to be detected at once, and identified using the corresponding barcode.