Lutz Lab at UW Bioengineering. Research point-of-care diagnostic technologies for global health applications.

Working to build meaningful, mutually beneficial, and sustainable relationships between the UW Bioengineering Department and the great biotech community by hosting networking events, industry seminars, company site visits, panel discussions, and more.

Chilkoti Laboratory – Ashutosh Chilkoti, Ph.DDeveloped a rapid, point-of-care assay to simultaneously measure antibody neutralization of multiple SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein variants of concern using patient plasma with a goal of predicting breakthrough infection.Integrated ELISA-like assays onto microfluidic “lab-on-a-chip” devices to minimize user intervention duringtesting.

Lab of Charles Sanders, PhD. ,Vanderbilt Center for Structural BiologyExpressed, purified, and characterized Alzheimer’s disease-linked proteins to determine possible links to the pathogenic mechanism.Determined the oligomerization properties of Alzheimer’s-related protein C99 via mutagenesis in C-loop region, 2D NMR techniques, and enzymatic activity assays.Refined bacterial expression and purification protocol of Microtubule Assembly Protein Tau and determine its binding affinity to C99.

Senior Design Project: Five-member team constructed a novel microfluidic bioreactor for the testing of chemotherapeutics on patient-derived cancer organoids under the guidance of Dr. John Wikswo and Dr. Ann Richmond. This device will serve as an in vitro alternative to traditional methods of chemotherapy selection. We fabricated this microfluidic bioreactor in the Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering class 1000 clean room using SU-8 soft lithography followed by PDMS casting.