Research.

Chilkoti Lab – Pratt Fellows

Description: Ebolavirus (EBOV) hemorrhagic fever outbreaks posts a serious public health emergency due to EBOV disease ease of contagion and high mortality rates. EBOV outbreaks are difficult to predict and contain due to the zoonotic nature of this family of viruses. Rapid isolation and early treatment require a low-cost, point-of-care diagnostic (POCD) to screen at-risk populations with sensitivity and specificity. Compared to the gold standard polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) test, which is resource-and time-intensive, POCDs produce results instantly, are easy to access, and demand less equipment. However, developing accurate and sensitive POCDs rely on high affinity antibody (Ab) pairs that can be challenging and slow to generate. My work entails the use of surface display to screen various libraries of binding protein scaffolds—such as nanobodies—to more rapidly generate ultrasensitive POCDs. My project is meant to offer a novel workflow to rapidly developing ultrasensitive POCDs, which may contribute to means for fast containment and effective early treatment of EBOV and other similarly contagious and deadly diseases in low-resource settings.

Supervisor Name: Dr. Ashutosh Chilkoti

Mentor: Dr. Cassio Mendes Fontes

Dates: October 2022 – May 2024

Hours to Date: 1760 (40 hr/week during semester; 60 hr/week during summer)

Truskey Lab

Computational Project: Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory disorder that is often the pathological condition behind cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Tissue Engineered Blood Vessels(TEBVs) provide an excellent model to study the development of atherosclerosis in vitro.The functionality of TEBVs is measured by their ability to constrict and dilate in response to treatment with vasoconstrictive drug phenylephrine (PE) and vasodilative drug acetylcholine (AC). Formerly, these diameter measurements were done manually, which is time consuming and prone to personal bias. My work entailed automating the functional analysis with MATLAB to improve the precision and efficiency of analysis. This has the potential to help advance current efforts in understanding atherosclerosis to fight the leading cause of death in America: cardiovascular disease.

Wet-lab Project: As mentioned in my first research experience, further exploration of the disease progression of Atherosclerosis and its resulting condition, Cardiovascular Disease (CVD), is needed so that appropriate treatments can be developed and to enable early diagnosis of the leading cause of death in America. My first wet-lab project dealt with exploring whether Branch Chained Amino Acids (BCAA) demonstrated a causative relationship with disease progression since the literature has demonstrated a correlative relationship. By gradient dosing endothelial cells and fibroblasts with oxidized low-density lipoprotein (positive control) and two distinct cocktails of BCAAs, the production of reactive oxygen species was quantified through immunostaining. I performed the cell culture, treatment, staining, imaging, quantification, and analysis of data for the fibroblasts completely independently after learning the techniques from my graduate student mentor.

Supervisor: Dr. George Truskey

Mentor: Ellery Jones

Dates: May 2020 – September 2021

Hours Spent: 860