Congratulations to Jun and Henry for winning a President’s Undergraduate Research Awards (PURA) for Spring 2020! PURA fund student salaries to conduct undergraduate research with Georgia Tech faculty and offset travel expenses for undergraduates to present their research at professional conferences. Between two hundred and three hundred competitive awards are offered on campus each year. […]

Kevin has been selected as a Petit Undergraduate Scholar for 2018 with Ida serving as his Petit Mentor. Congratulations! From the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, “The Petit Undergraduate Research Scholars program is a competitive scholarship program that serves to develop the next generation of leading bioengineering and bioscience researchers by providing a comprehensive […]

Grad student Ian Miller presented his work on thermal control of CAR T cells at the Fred Hutch Immuno-Oncology Graduate Student Symposium hosted by Fred Hutch’s Immunotherapy Integrated Research Center (IIRC). Participants were able to meet faculty, learn about the breadth of research done in immuno-oncology, visit research laboratories and shared resource facilities, and tour […]

Hathaichanok “Noina” Phuengkham joins LSI as a new post-doc. Noina originally hails from Thailand and completed her Ph.D. studies at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea where she developed biomaterials to alter immunosuppressive tumor microenvironments with Dr. Yong Taik Lim. Read more about Noina here.

Dr. Kwong was invited to speak at the Transplant Immunosuppression 2019 Conference in Minneapolis, MN. The course focused on current options for immunosuppression (and what’s in the pipeline), with particular attention to individualization of immunosuppression based on clinical and/or laboratory parameters; prevention, diagnosis and treatment of antibody-mediated rejection; improving long-term transplant outcomes; and major issues […]

Ali was raised in San Diego, CA before moving to São Paulo, Brazil for three years. He attended UCSD where he graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in Bioengineering. As an undergraduate, he developed a STEM immersion program for a local high school. In the lab, Ali investigated new drug delivery techniques to reduce […]

Our work with the Qiu group is now online in PLoS Computational Biology! The activity of enzymatic proteins, which are called proteases, drives numerous important processes in health and disease: including cancer, immunity, and infectious disease. Many labs have developed useful diagnostics by designing sensors that measure the activity of these proteases. However, if we […]

Multiple students were awarded podium talks at the 2019 BMES Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA. They are: Brandon Holt – “Synthetic biological circuits for treating prodrug-resistant bacteria” Brandon Holt – “Proteases as biological bits for programmable medicine” Ian Miller – “Remote Control of CAR T Cells Using Thermal Cues” Shreyas Dahotre – “Ultrasensitive Detection of […]

Dr. Kwong was invited to participate in the Synthetic Biomarkers for Detection of Cancers at Incipient and Early Stages (SYNDICATE) Think Tank Meeting hosted by the Division of Cancer Prevention (DCP) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and co-chaired by Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr. Sam Gambhir, Stanford University. The think tank […]

Adrian was born in Dover, Delaware but spent half of his life in Dahlonega, GA. He graduated cum laude from the University of Georgia, where he received a B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. During his undergraduate years, he worked in Dr. Amy Medlock’s laboratory, investigating the regulatory roles of Peroxiredoxin 5 and Progesterone Receptor […]

LSI awarded $500,000 from the NSF Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems (CBET) for "Ultra-fast transient cell adhesion and its application for high-throughput microfluidic cell sorting". Our co-PI's are Dr. Alexander Alexeev (associate professor, The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering) and Todd Sulchek (professor, The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical […]

The labs of Gabe Kwong (assistant professor, Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering) and M.G. Finn (professor, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry) were awarded a grant for “Activity biosensors that implement Boolean logic as precision diagnostics for immunotherapy.” The researchers reason that disease detection and evaluation of treatment responses in vivo depend on the ability to extract clinically […]

The Laboratory for Synthetic Immunity is part of a $21.9 million award from DARPA to develop gene therapies to enable protection against a wide range of influenza strains and improve immune responses and efficacy of current influenza vaccines. The work, led by Phil Santangelo at Georgia Tech, is being performed by researchers at GT, Duke, […]

Congratulations to Anna for winning an Astronaut Scholarship from the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation (ASF). In 2019, ASF awarded 52 scholarships to students from 38 different universities across the nation. Astronaut Scholarships are awarded to students in their junior and senior year of college studying science, technology, engineering, or mathematics with the intent to pursue research […]

Lena traveled to Ascona, Switzerland to present her talk “Heat-triggered CRISPR-dCas9 for the remote control of therapeutic T cells” at Synthims 2019. The conference covered insights in therapeutic protein engineering, rational vaccine design and delivery; advances in single-cell sequencing and microfluidics as related to the adaptive immune system; adoptive immune cell transfer therapies; and cancer […]

Congratulations to Lee-Kai Sun for receiving a 2019 Barry Goldwater Scholarship! The Goldwater Scholarship is the preeminent undergraduate award for outstanding students pursuing careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. Goldwater Scholars have been awarded 92 Rhodes Scholarships, 137 Marshall Awards, 159 Churchill Scholarships, 104 Hertz Fellowships, and numerous other distinguished awards […]

LSI has received a $1.8 million grant from the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health to develop activity sensors to monitor responses to cancer immunotherapy! This work will expand our sensor platform, which has already been used to detect thrombosis, liver fibrosis, cancer, and organ transplant rejection. Read more about this work […]

Congratulations to Mimi for winning a PURA Award! President's Undergraduate Research Awards fund student salaries to conduct undergraduate research with Georgia Tech faculty and offset travel expenses for undergraduates to present their research at professional conferences.

Our recently published paper in Nature Biomedical Engineering was highlighted in Nature Reviews Nephrology!

Our work on activity sensors for early and noninvasive detection of acute transplant rejection was just published in Nature Biomedical Engineering! Congrats to Quoc and the team! Summary | The current diagnostic “gold” standard to monitor transplant patients for signs of organ rejection is the tissue biopsy. However, this procedure is invasive and lacks the ability to […]

FierceMedTech has named Glympse Bio, co-founded by LSI director Dr. Gabe Kwong, as one of its Fierce 15 for 2018. Each year FierceMedTech spotlights 15 of the most innovative and promising startups in the medtech industry. Read more about what makes Glympse fierce here and here.

Brandon gave a podium talk titled "Biological Bits for Computing Classical and Quantum-Inspired Algorithms" at the Complex Active and Adaptive Material Systems Gordon Research Seminar in Ventura, CA. This conference was focused on formulating new ways to inscribe the vital functions found in biological systems into synthetic materials and complex structures. Congrats Brandon and great to […]

The global prevalence of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) has risen precipitously over the past two decades in parallel with the worldwide obesity epidemic, and these diseases are associated with progressive fibrosis and an increased risk of liver cancer. The field lacks an integrated understanding of risk prediction, pathogenesis and validated […]

Our work on synthesizing DNA-barcoded pMHC tetramers to detect single antigen-specific T cells by ddPCR was published in Analytical Chemistry! Congrats to Shreyas and the team!Read the full manuscript here.