Department Seminar: Umer Hassan

When

October 27, 2017    
1:10 pm - 2:00 pm

Where

3043 ECpE Building Addition
Coover Hall, Ames, Iowa, 50011

Event Type

Umer HassanSpeaker: Umer Hassan, Research Scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Title: Translational Immunoengineering Biomedical Sensors for Transforming Disease Theranostics

Abstract: Micro-Nano technologies have played a critical role in developing Point-of-Care (PoC) technologies for health-care applications. The availability of PoC testing can have a significant impact on infectious diseases diagnostics, which remain the leading cause of mortality around the world. Diagnosing disease at its onset will have a critical impact in timely administrating the therapeutic interventions that can save patients’ lives. In this talk, I will discuss my research work on development of PoC biosensors for disease diagnostics in particular HIV/AIDS and sepsis. I will present the differential immuno-capture microfluidic technology that I developed for specific white blood cell counting and quantifying the cell surface antigen expression levels. First, roughly 33 million people are infected with HIV with 69% of them living in sub-Saharan Africa. I will present the microfluidic biochip developed to electrically enumerate CD4+ and CD8+ T cells for AIDS diagnostics from a drop of blood. In clinical studies, biochip is tested from blood samples collected from healthy and HIV infected donors. Second, in case of sepsis, roughly 5 million patients are admitted annually to ICUs in the United States, of these, severe sepsis strikes to more than 1 million people, with an estimated 30 percent of these people die. My work has been focused on quantifying CD64 antigen expression levels, total white blood cell count and its subtypes as potential cellular biomarkers for sepsis stratification. I have developed a biochip that can quantify these biomarkers using only 10μL of whole blood at PoC under 30 minutes and validated it in extensive clinical studies. Further, I will discuss the integration of these biosensors in the predictive data analytical systems for individualized patient stratification. I will conclude with the discussion on the role of micro-nano technologies in solving emerging challenges of immuno-engineering, antibiotic resistance and precision pharmacotherapy for global-health applications. PoC devices integrated with computational systems could dramatically improve patient stratification in an individualized way, resulting in increased survival rates, and can save healthcare systems billions of dollars around the world.

Bio: Umer Hassan is a Research Scientist in the Department of Bioengineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He completed his M.S and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering with emphasis on biosensing and nanotechnology from UIUC. Umer’s research has been focused on developing point-of-care (PoC) translational biosensors for disease diagnostic applications. He has received Brandt Early Career Investigator Award in Precision Medicine (2017), BMES Career Development Award (2017), Baxter Young Investigator Award (2016), Emerging Engineer Award (2015), Cozad New Venture Competition Award (2014), NSF I-Corps Fellowship (2014) and Our Common Future Fellowship (2010). In 2014, Umer cofounded a startup, Prenosis, Inc. that is working on commercializing his developed biosensors.

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