Inspired by the implications of dysregulated protease activities in a wide range of human diseases, the development of multiplexed monitoring of such aberrant activities has shown potentials to distinguish diverse disease states and become an emerging paradigm for precision diagnostics. This webinar will discuss synthetic biomarkers, or activity-based nanosensors (ABNs), a technology that can simultaneously sense multiple proteolytic activities in the disease microenvironment and generate corresponding signals outside of the body for non-invasive monitoring. I will focus on the applications of ABN technology for non-invasive detection via exhaled breath. Although breath testing is known as a convenient, non-invasive, and rapid method for disease evaluation,few breath tests are currently used in the clinic due to bottlenecks in identifying endogenous biomarkers in complex breath signatures. To address this, I will summarize our strategies of engineering synthetic biomarkers containing exogenous and biocompatible volatile reporters that can be expelled from breath after disease-specific proteolytic processing. Further, advances in achieving optimal multiplexing by molecular design that enable probing of various catalytic types of proteases and expanding chemical repertoire of synthetic volatiles, as well as our latest applications in the detection of lung infection and cancer, will be discussed.
Dr. Christine (Shih-Ting) Wangis a postdoctoral associate in the lab of Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her current project focuses on the development of in vivo activity based nanosensors for non-invasive detection of lung diseases. Prior to this, she was a research associate in the lab of Dr. Oleg Gang at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where she worked on DNA nanotechnology for protein lattice engineering and nanomedicine applications.Christine (Shih-Ting) Wang completed her Ph.D. research in the lab of Dr. Molly Stevens on type II diabetes-related biosensing and amyloidfibrillation. From 2016 to 2020, she has worked as a facility user in theMolecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Herresearch revolves around de novo molecular design and nanoscale engineering for understanding biological mechanisms and for medicine applications.
