James Bishop has been awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) F32 Postdoctoral Fellowship! This competitive grant is awarded by the NIH on a national basis for highly promising postdoctoral candidates to support their potential to become productive, independent investigators in scientific health-related research fields. He will be working on drug uncaging technologies to alleviate chronic pain.

Tommaso Di Ianni was awarded a School of Medicine Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, a highly competitive fellowship to support young investigators in the first two years of their postdoctoral research training. Tommaso is working on designing ultrasound transducers that will enable behavioral studies in awake freely-moving animals, along with functional ultrasound to imaging brain activity in real time.

Daivik Vyas has been rewarded a MedScholars Fellowship to conduct research on using ultrasound to modulate the glymphatic system for drug delivery. The MedScholars program provides funding for Stanford medical students to conduct research in basic, clinical, and translational settings.

Jeff Wang has been rewarded a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (SIGF) to characterize whole-brain oscillatory, metabolic, and behavioral changes associated with localized ketamine uncaging. The SIGF is a competitive, university-wide award given to doctoral students engaged in interdisciplinary research in humanities, social sciences, basic sciences, and engineering.

Congrats again to all!

Here, we show that nanoparticle-mediated ultrasonic drug uncaging is generalizable to a wide range of hydrophobic drugs and also demonstrate the needed stability and drug loading for clinical translation. Given this wide range of drugs, we have the potential to potentially treat diseases as wide-ranging as cancer, neuropsychiatric disorders, and stroke. The paper can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142961219301656?via%3Dihub.

Congratulations to our high school student Ananya Karthik, who was selected as a Regeneron Science Talent Search finalist as one of the top 40 out of almost 2,000 students! Ananya has been working on the synthesis and characterization of our nanoparticles for noninvasive ultrasonic drug uncaging.

The Regeneron Science Talent Search is the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors. As part of being a finalist, Ananya has earned a $25,000 prize and is in the running for the grand prize pf $250,000!! Ananya Karthik joins the ranks of 13 Nobel prize winners, 18 MacArthur Foundation Fellows and many other distinguished alumni of the Science Talent Search. We’re proud to have worked with Ananya, and we wish her best of luck in this final stage of the competition. For more information about the competition, please visit here.

Our lab’s publication entitled “Noninvasive Ultrasonic Drug Uncaging” is now published in Neuron and available here. Congrats to the authors!

This work demonstrates that nanoparticle-mediated ultrasonic drug uncaging noninvasively modulates brain activity with precision determined by the ultrasound focus extent and the kinetics of the uncaged drug. By uncaging the anesthetic propofol in the visual cortex, we can reversibly silence visually evoked potentials, with onset and recovery of our effect happening in seconds. Furthermore, with [18-F] FDG PET, we show that our effect is limited to the sonication focus on the millimeter scale. Finally, by performing a global analysis of all of our PET images, we demonstrate that we can causatively map functional connectivity in the brain.

You can read more about our work either in Stanford’s press release or in the media!

A hearty Airan Lab welcome to James Bishop PhD, who is joining the lab as part of his prestigious Stanford Molecular Imaging Scholars fellowship. James has in depth interest in solving the debilitating condition of chronic pain. He joins us after completing initial postdoctoral training with friends-of-the-lab and collaborators Nolan Williams MD and David Spiegel MD in Stanford Psychiatry, working to treat patients suffering from chronic pain using TMS. James did his undergraduate studies at Virginia Tech before working as a research assistant at Harvard for several years, where he used a variety of cutting-edge techniques including optogenetics and advanced functional MRI methods to study pain both in animal models and clinical populations. He then completed his PhD training with Magdalena Naylor MD PhD & Helene Langevin MD at the University of Vermont, using neuroimaging to study chronic pain in human subjects. In our group, he will work with us, Michelle James PhD, and Sandip Biswal MD to use ultrasonic drug uncaging to modulate pain responses, and image the resultant effects using novel PET tracers for pain imaging, in animal models of chronic pain secondary to cancer.

Dr. Jeffrey Wang has been accepted into the Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology graduate training program where he will be expected to engage as a contributing member of the community, attend center seminars and the annual trainee meetings, present his work to the community, and to take an active role in assisting with ongoing center events, or in developing new ways to strengthen and enrich the community.

For this program, Jeff had to pass through a competitive application process that involved essentially having to complete a second qualifying examination to demonstrate his knowledge and aptitude regarding quantitative techniques, and to defend his thesis proposal on defining a spatiotemporally resolved model for the physiological action of ketamine using ultrasonic drug uncaging. Congratulations, Jeffrey!

https://web.stanford.edu/group/mbc/graduate_training.html

In April 2018, the NIH/NCI Nanoparticle Characterization Laboratory (NCL) accepted our propofol-loaded polymeric perfluorocarbon nanoemulsions into their characterization and testing program, which is designed to promote the clinical translation of novel nanomedicines. These propofol-loaded nanoparticles  will now undergo their rigorous in vitro and in vivo evaluation. If these particles pass the NCL assays with acceptable results, we plan to apply for an investigatory license from the FDA for first-in-human trials to complete noninvasive functional brain mapping as part of neurologic and neurosurgical evaluations.

https://nanolab.cancer.gov/sites/default/files/May%202018.pdf