| Date and Venue Information: |
| 08 June 2018, 4.00 pm, Seminar Hall, Department of Chemistry |
| Title of Lecture: |
| A Plasmonics Route towards Spectroscopic Fingerprinting of the Tumor and its Microenvironment by Soumik Siddhanta |
| Abstract |
| Molecular imaging and spectroscopy have emerged as new paradigms in the area of biophotonics for the interrogation of biological processes in living organisms. The challenges in biomedical sciences such as early stage diagnosis of diseases and studying the mechanism of disease progression requires the development of multi-dimensional and multi-modality imaging and sensing platforms with unmatched image acquisition speed, resolution, penetration depth and molecular information. The research has been directed towards combining the high sensitivity of plasmon-enhanced vibrational spectroscopy with the molecular specificity for probing oncogenic proteins and neoplastic cells with the aim of disease diagnosis at an early stage. The lecture will focus on a fully non-functionalized route for modulating the cellular environment for enhanced diffusion through the mucosal barrier and uptake of plasmonic nanoprobes by cancer cells for label-free spectroscopic fingerprinting. Through engineering of multimodal theranostic nanoprobes, the in-vivo targeting and detection of castration-resistant prostate cancer will be demonstrated. Also, the new methods and devices developed will be presented for the elucidation of morphological and molecular information from subtle variation in molecular interactions with the nanoprobes. These approaches can pave the way for the development of advanced analytical methods for monitoring and understanding complex pathologies such as cancer. |
| Brief Profile | |
| Soumik Siddhanta is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University. His areas of interests include molecular imaging, vibrational spectroscopy, plasmonics, and biophotonics. His research is focused on harnessing the potent combination of the engineered plasmonic nanoprobes and label-free plasmon enhanced vibrational spectroscopy for diagnosis, imaging, manipulation and control of biological structure and function from the nanoscale to the tissue level. |  |
| During the Ph.D. Program at JNCASR, Bangalore, he had worked on developing label-free methods to probe small molecule-protein interactions through surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy. He was the recipient of Indo-US Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF) Student Research Fellowship, 2014 and the American Society for Laser Medicine & Surgery (ASLMS) Research Grant, 2016-'17. Also, he is a Hopkins Engineering Applications & Research Tutorials (HEART) program instructor and a Teaching As Research (TAR) Fellow at JHU. |
