Congratulations to 2nd-year PhD candidate, Hannah Morris, for completing her gateway exam last week! We can’t wait to see all of the amazing things you accomplish. Here’s to more successful droplet grating applications in the years to come!
We are so proud of you, Hannah! Congrats on completing this significant milestone in your graduate school journey!
Congratulations to PhD candidate, Hanyu, for successfully presenting his 3rd-year seminar titled “Impacts of Synthesis Conditions on Membrane Protein Incorporation into Nanodiscs”! Great job, Hanyu!
Congratulations to PhD candidate, Manik, for successfully presenting his 3rd-year seminar titled “Derivation of Pediatric Sepsis Biomarker Signatures Using Photonic Microring Resonators”! Great job, Manik!
Congratulations to PhD candidate, Lindsay, for successfully presenting her 3rd-year seminar titled “A Dynamic Phase Grating Approach to Probing Content in Microfluidic Droplet Trains”! Lindsay was also this year’s winner of a Conference Travel Award for Outstanding 3rd year Analytical Seminar! Great job, Lindsay!
Congratulations to PhD candidate, Ayush, for successfully presenting his 3rd-year seminar titled “Development of a Droplet Microfluidics Platform for the Rapid Detection of Electrolytes”! Great job, Ayush!
Congratulations to 3rd-year student Manik Reddy who was awarded the Spring/Summer Carpenter, D. C. Memorial Fellowship through the chemistry department! Way to go!
Congratulations to all the departmental fellowship awardees!
Congratulations to Dr. Krista Meserve on her recent first author publication in PLOS One. Congratulations also to Dr. Cole Chapman, Dr. Heather Robison, and 3rd-year PhD Candidate Manik Reddy for their contributions to this work.
Abstract: Active tuberculosis (TB) is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) bacteria and is characterized by multiple phases of infection, leading to difficulty in diagnosing and treating infected individuals. Patients with latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) can reactivate to the active phase of infection following perturbation of the dynamic bacterial and immunological equilibrium, which can potentially lead to further Mtb transmission. However, current diagnostics often lack specificity for LTBI and do not inform on TB reactivation risk. We hypothesized that immune profiling readily available QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus (QFT) plasma supernatant samples could improve LTBI diagnostics and infer risk of TB reactivation. We applied a whispering gallery mode, silicon photonic microring resonator biosensor platform to simultaneously quantify thirteen host proteins in QFT-stimulated plasma samples. Using machine learning algorithms, the biomarker concentrations were used to classify patients into relevant clinical bins for LTBI diagnosis or TB reactivation risk based on clinical evaluation at the time of sample collection. We report accuracies of over 90% for stratifying LTBI + from LTBI– patients and accuracies reaching over 80% for classifying LTBI + patients as being at high or low risk of reactivation. Our results suggest a strong reliance on a subset of biomarkers from the multiplexed assay, specifically IP-10 for LTBI classification and IL-10 and IL-2 for TB reactivation risk assessment. Taken together, this work introduces a 45-minute, multiplexed biomarker assay into the current TB diagnostic workflow and provides a single method capable of classifying patients by LTBI status and TB reactivation risk, which has the potential to improve diagnostic evaluations, personalize treatment and management plans, and optimize targeted preventive strategies in Mtb infections.
Congratulations to 2nd-year PhD candidate, Anusha Vajrala, for completing her gateway exam at the beginning of the month! Here’s to successful microring applications to infectious diseases and mosquito-borne flaviviruses in the years to come!
Congrats, Anusha, for completing this significant milestone in your graduate school journey! We are all so proud of you!
The 2025 Pittcon conference and exposition was held on March 1st-5th in Boston, MA. This event brought together analytical scientists in academia and industry with a keynote lecture presented by Professor Cato T. Laurencin from the University of Connecticut. Third year students Ayush Chitrakar, Manik Reddy and Hanyu Zheng represented the Bailey lab with poster presentations!
Professor Ryan Bailey was the organizer for the session “Analyst at 150: The Longest-serving Measurement Science Journal Continues to Shape the Field.” During the session, he gave a talk titled “Multiplexed Biomarker Analysis to Improve Diagnostics of Infections and Infectious Diseases.”
Congratulations to all the presenters!
Ryan traveled to Cairo, Egypt at the end of January to present a talk titled “Multiplexed Biomarker Analysis to Improve Diagnostics of Infections and Infectious Diseases” to the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at Ain Shams University!
