Lately, I've been caught up talking about daytrading as a lot has been going on in that scene for the past week or so (huge weekend reduction concurrent with the beginning of a massive pump). However, as I've stated in my first post, the reason I've made this account is primarily to talk about science and my experience being a co-founder in a hopefully successful startup in silicon valley. This post will serve as a very short introduction detailing basically what I do!
Who am I
Right now, the title of my program is bioinformatics and biomolecular engineering. However, I find everyday that I'm leaning more and more towards the engineering aspect of my program; I came here to be a bioinformatician but it looks like I will leave an engineer!
What do I do?
Currently, we are working on creating biosensors to measure analytes in bodily fluids such as blood or saliva in real-time. We have been working with HSV, CMV, as well as HIV viruses. I'm a relatively new member to this lab group, so I haven't accomplished that much yet. But some cool things that I have done, was found that we can differentiate IgM antibodies from IgG antibodies specific to HIV in blood. This could be a big deal, IgM antibodies show up in your blood before IgG antibodies do; traditional HIV screening tests screen for IgG antibodies as well as the HIV itself. However, if we made a screen that tested for IgM antibodies, it may be possible to detect the virus inside of someone more recently after their infection! We will most likely pursue this topic and publish it at a later time (as our collective focus is elsewhere as a lab currently).
Some Pictures!
Anyhow, this is me with a timestamp next to my head! I am a real person, and am who I describe myself to be.
Here is a photo of the instrument I mainly use. It used to be a sequencing machine, however we cannabalized it, and reprogrammed it! Now it is a moving electrode holder. Basically, we tell it to test a huge array of samples. We click a button and it'll run a 6 hour experiment for us (if you can imagine it going from well to well in those 96 well plates) while we can do other tasks.
Here is a photo of the needle we use to attach sensors to. We functionalize the inside of the hollow needle with a bunch of different layers of polymers. The outermost layer is the sensor itself. In the case of HIV, the outermost layer would be HIV antibodies which bind specifically to the HIV virus.
I hope some of you find interest in some of this stuff! I'll be posting more in-depth articles in the future; perhaps about the sensors themselves, and of course about the process I'm going through with the start-up!
Thanks for reading!