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!

Some of our work on noninvasive neuromodulation and our nanoparticles was just featured in Science. You can read the article here. For this essay, Raag was awarded as the Finalist for the Science and PINS prize for neuromodulation.

Raag will soon head to Beijing and Jinan in China to receive this prize and present at Tsinghua University and the 8th Neuromodulation Congress.

Congratulations Raag!

Recently, our work on noninvasive neuromodulation using focused ultrasound-mediated drug delivery has been published in Nano Letters! You can also read about our work in a couple of nice write-ups in the popular press – for instance at Futurity and NanoTechWeb. Please stay tuned for more!