Ambailka Tanak

Today, we’ll share the story of Ambalika Tanak, a PhD candidate in Bioengineering at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Science.

“I am a doctoral candidate in the bioengineering department under the guidance of Dr. Shalini Prasad. My research is focused on designing rapid point-of-care biosensors for patient-centric disease detection. These sensors can be catered towards the type of disease and can be used at the patient’s bedside, emergency department, or at-home. We have developed and validated our sensing device to detect and monitor complicated diseases like sepsis, which is more common than breast cancer, prostate cancer, and AIDS combined.

To be able to contribute my efforts towards effective health care solutions gives me immense satisfaction. The opportunity to collaborate with clinicians, requiring rapid point-of-care sensing technology drives me to come up with creative solutions for existing drawbacks. The feeling that you have the ability to improve the patient outcomes indirectly one way or another makes my research special for me.

We hope the technology we are developing will directly impact providing patient-centric care, especially for a complicated disease like sepsis, by understanding patient immune response. Sepsis is a life-threatening reaction of the body to an infection which can escalate to multiple organ failure. Every hour of delayed treatment could decrease the patient’s survival chances, and current technologies fail to deliver rapid results. Our work demonstrates an ear-patient point-of-care testing device to detect sepsis by targeting patients’ immune response within 5 minutes using a single drop of the sample (bloodplasma).”

PhD Candidate,
Bioengineering,
Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Science