Govind Kaigala

We engineer tools for biology and medicine!

We build these new and unique tools with the long-term goal of enabling discovery and rapid growth in biology and the translation of technology to applied medicine, thus accelerating their transformation from qualitative practices to quantitative sciences.

Laboratory name: Quantitative technologies for biology and medicine.

The focus of my teams research program is understanding and characterizing spatio-temporal biological processes, which requires interrogation of biological samples across different scales and innovations in technological devices and platforms, highly sensitive bioassays, and multimodal data integration within cell biology and pathology workflows. We will develop microscale devices and technologies for spatio-temporal analysis that can help interrogate several life-processes at different scales. Such technologies are strongly applicable in cancer research and for advancing the broader vision of personalized molecular medicine. Along with innovations in microtechnology, we will develop precision bioanalytics to help create robust solutions for studying and engineering cellular interactions and enabling next-generation quantitative molecular pathology. In addition to assisting in discovery-based research, these new methods may assist in improved patient stratification and diagnostics, and the multi-modal acquisition and data handling may also aid in better therapeutic decisions.

Low-analyte detection systems

In performing spatio-temporal interrogation of biological samples, two main challenges arise, analytes are often retrieved from a few cells at low concentrations and low volumes using traditional recovery methods, and the transient changes in biomolecular content of cells are difficult to track and quantify due to slow and inefficient sampling. Capabilities to engineer devices, methods and systems will be developed in this module.

Microscale fluid control platforms

Microscale flow control techniques are at the core of implementing spatial bioassays. We will take three approaches to build such microfluidic devices: (a) microfabrication, (b) micromachining and (c) rapid prototyping (PDMS and 3D printing). Assembly and post-processing of (a)-(c) will need to be performed. In addition, this module would need to be integrated with custom electronics and machined platforms. The goal will be to build a range of liquids scanning probes and reconfigurable microfluidic platforms.

Cellular interface engineering

We are developing new ways to create unique biological interfaces to study heterogeneity in 2D and 3D.

Multiomic data acquisition and integration

New approaches to process FFPE and frozen tissues to perform a range of biochemical and biophysical interrogation of tissues. A particular focus will be on quantitation of analytes including fluorescence, IR imaging and create new ways of multi-omic characterization. These platforms will also be capable run a computational framework to integrate this data.