1. Sensing and monitoring 2. Imaging 3. Cancer Therapy 4. In vitro models
In 2010, Dr Sylvain Ladame was appointed lecturer in biosensor development at Imperial College London. Since then, he has been a key member of the "Cancer and Engineering initiative led by the departments of Bioengineering and Medicine at Imperial College and has been working on the engineering and validation of new chemical probes and devices for ultrasensitive sensing of circulating nucleic acids in blood as a mean to diagnose cancers early and non-invasively. His most recent work was published in Analytical Chemistry (2016) and was selected as ACS editors' choice. Sylvain is also the academic lead of a new 4-year molecular bioengineering degree that will be launched in the department of Bioengineering of imperial college in Oct. 2017.
Dr. Jason Y.H. Chang is currently a Postdoctoral research associate in Prof.Darrell Irvine's lab at the Koch Institute at MIT, working on nanotechnologies for HIV vaccine development and detection of cell-free miRNA in cancer models. Prior to MIT, he obtained his MEng (Hons) in Product Design Engineering at Loughborough University in 2009, and then joined Imperial College London to obtain his MSc in Bioengineering in 2010, followed by an internship at University of Arizona working on developing a medium-throughput VE-cadherin screening assay. In 2011, he returned to Imperial College to pursue his PhD in ocular biomechanics and drug delivery with Prof. Darryl Overby, where he worked on the development of a peptide-based biosensor to detect nitric oxide production in the eye and drug delivery platforms to decrease elevated intraocular pressure the primary risk factor for glaucoma. During this time he was also a visiting researcher at Duke University (2013-2014) working with Prof. W Daniel Stamer on pharmacological interventions to alleviate ocular hypertension in both animal and human eyes. After completing his PhD in 2016, he joined the Ladame group to help develop different platform technologies for prostate cancer diagnosis based on sensing of circulating miRNA biomarkers from liquid biopsies using engineered oligonucleotide-templated reactions.