(4jt) Next-Generation Epidermal Platforms for Continuous Health Monitoring

Teaching Interests: Transport Phenomena, Analytical Chemistry, Electrochemistry

The current market for biosensor-based health monitoring has an estimate to reach $140 billion by 2025, which is almost five times higher than last decade. The overall demand for biosensors has seen an ever-rising trend majorly due to the following two reasons: (a) Biosensors can allow rapid decentralized monitoring of several disease related biomarkers through either wearables, or in-situ point-of-care (POC) testing platforms, (b) Such platforms can allow real-time tracking of one’s health status without minimal discomfort or intervention of trained medical professionals. Although, many non-invasive alternative (to blood) biofluids have been investigated for several disease related biomarker detection, they remain either difficult to sample, get detected with high sensitivity, and not fully explored for their biochemical partitioning pathway from blood.^[1,2] Even the devices measuring them are rigid, bulky, and high power consuming. Hence, my research interest relies on addressing these limitations by developing novel techniques for non-invasive biofluid sampling, transport, management, and novel electrochemical redox mechanisms for targeting unconventional biomarker (new metabolites, cytokines, hormones) sensing, which can be executed on both POC and wearable form factors. From material aspect, the key focus will be to develop soft and biodegradable hydrogels, polymeric substrates, components for wearables (patches, microneedles), ingestible (capsules), or point-of-care devices (touch based/lateral flow) for biomarker sensing, bioenergy harvesting, and even for drug delivery to sensitive body locations under decentralized settings. Going in this direction will also make my research unique vs. my current and previous advisors. My training on sweat and interstitial fluid based epidermal biomedical devices during my PhD^[3,4] and postdoc^[5] makes me a suitable candidate for such research, where my research group world work at the intersection of sensor development, polymer chemistry, nanomaterials, colloids and interfacial science, microfluidics, electrochemistry, device fabrication, and in-vivo (on-body and clinical) validations. My research would also hold the scope of seeking collaborations from electrical engineers (for electronic integration), data scientists (for correlation studies), and medical professionals (for clinical trials), eventually making it highly interdisciplinary by nature. My teaching interests would range from core courses such transport phenomena and thermodynamics to electives such as colloidal science and analytical chemistry. Overall, as a faculty member, I intend on training the next generation of chemical engineers for health-based research.

References:

1. Saha, T., Del Caño, R., la De Paz, E., Sandhu, S.S., and Wang, J. (2022) Access and Management of Sweat for Non‐Invasive Biomarker Monitoring: A Comprehensive Review. Small, 2206064, 2206064.
2. Saha, T., Del Caño, R., Mahato, K., De la Paz, E., Chen, C., Ding, S., Yin, L., and Wang, J. (2023) Wearable Electrochemical Glucose Sensors in Diabetes Management: A Comprehensive Review. Chem. Rev.
3. Saha, T., Fang, J., Mukherjee, S., Dickey, M.D., and Velev, O.D. (2021) Wearable Osmotic-Capillary Patch for Prolonged Sweat Harvesting and Sensing. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces, 13 (7), 8071–8081.
4. Saha, T., Songkakul, T., Knisely, C.T., Yokus, M.A., Daniele, M.A., Dickey, M.D., Bozkurt, A., and Velev, O.D. (2022) Wireless Wearable Electrochemical Sensing Platform with Zero-Power Osmotic Sweat Extraction for Continuous Lactate Monitoring. ACS Sensors, 7 (7), 2037–2048.
5. Moon, J., Del Caño, R., Moonla, C., Sakdaphetsiri, K., Saha, T., Francine Mendes, L., Yin, L., Chang, A., Seker, S., and Wang, J. (2022) Self-Testing of Ketone Bodies, along with Glucose, Using Touch-Based Sweat Analysis. ACS Sensors, 7 (12), 3973–3981.