Please join us for a seminar with Netz Arroyo, INBT associate faculty member. Join us using the Zoom information below.

https://wse.zoom.us/j/93459776858?pwd=S01FNDRGS0tTVHc4enBoYi9XbmpuQT09

Meeting ID: 934 5977 6858
Password: 114461

“Continuous, Real-Time monitoring of Small-Molecule Therapeutics in the Body”

Abstract: Personalized drug therapy seeks to tailor treatment to the individual, taking into consideration each person’s unique genotype and metabolism to determine a dose that maximizes drug efficacy and avoids toxicity. Realizing this goal has been extremely challenging, however, for two main reasons. First, it is difficult to determine the optimal drug dose for each patient due to our limited understanding of pharmacogenetics and physiology. Second, even the most sophisticated drug delivery approaches fail to account for hour-to-hour fluctuations in an individual’s metabolism driven by changes in health status, diet or drug interactions. Thus, there remains a pressing need for technologies supporting the real-time, in-vivo monitoring of drugs that would enable patient-specific, metabolism-responsive dosing. In response to this need, our laboratory pursues the development of reagentless sensing approaches that support continuous molecular measurements in the body. During this talk, I will describe an electrochemical approach that relies on DNA aptamers to perform real-time monitoring of small molecule targets, and the use of this approach to study pharmacokinetic changes in rats that originate from biological and metabolic variability.

Biography: Netz Arroyo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He has secondary appointments with Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology, and the Chemistry-Biology Interface programs. He received his B.S. in Chemical Sciences from Tec de Monterrey (Mexico), his Ph.D. degree in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin, and his postdoctoral training in Bioengineering from the University of California Santa Barbara. Dr. Arroyo’s research focuses on the development of electrochemical biosensing platforms that enable continuous, real-time measurements of specific molecules in the body. His lab employs such sensors to study molecular transport of therapeutics across biological barriers in vivo, and to develop decentralized, high-precision diagnostics for health care monitoring.