June Faculty Spotlight - Anubhav Tripathi
Anubhav Tripathi received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology. He completed his PhD in Chemical Engineering at City University of New York. Prior to joining the Brown University faculty in 2003, Prof. Tripathi worked as a research engineer for Caliper Life Sciences and founded Gauge MicroFluidics. His work is primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and several industry partners. He is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
Photo Credit: Amy Simmons / Brown University
1) When did you know you wanted to be a biomedical engineer/researcher?
Before I came to Brown I was educated and trained as a chemical engineer and I worked in industry at Caliper Life Sciences in Mountain View, California. I took biotechnology classes at night and was working on new technologies for DNA and RNA cells and I thought the most important issue was to improve healthcare. When I applied for a position at Brown I thought I wanted my focus to be more on biotechnology and healthcare solutions. I found a huge opportunity at Brown and saw that biomedical engineering was extremely interdisciplinary at Brown. Brown also has an advantage from its collaborations with multiple hospitals.
2) Of all of the publications you have written, is there one that you are most proud of? Why?
I am most proud of the SMART technology, which is basically an RNA-based detection system that uses a microfluidic platform. People usually convert RNA to DNA to do PCR analysis, but the SMART technology uses a microfluidic platform to adsorb RNA into a magnetic bead and isolate it. We then can amplify only the small sequence, which we attach to the RNA to detect it, so it overcomes RNA secondary structure problems and is isothermal and can work as well as PCR. We have applied it to influenza and HIV samples.
3) Did you ever do experiments that didn’t work?
Many! There are so many experiments that don’t work. We have focused a lot on HIV drug resistance. The problem is there is a lot of variability around that mutation and a lot of the technology we have developed that we couldn’t even publish was around detecting the mutation with that variability. None of the technologies have worked well enough yet, so that’s one example of things not working but we are still working on these technologies. Another example is that there are two close mobility proteins such as alzheimer’s proteins for which everyone is currently using HPLC columns, which are very labor and time intensive. We came up with an idea that’s been funded by NSF where we basically alter their structure a little bit by adding certain reagents and then separate those two isoforms of the disease We haven’t done that successfully yet either but we are still working on it.
4) How do you choose the projects your group works on?
We do two types of work. Some is funded by grants from NSF, NIH, and others but recently we have been doing a lot more work for industry. I continuously talk to different industry leaders, find out what their problems are, convert those into technical problems and innovate around those. If we feel we can innovate to solve a problem we reach out for funding from industry. As far as deciding which projects each student works on, students have to be self starters and do their own research to narrow down their interests and then learn the required skills. I try to let them select which project or research area they are most interested in but then they must have innovative ideas in their work.
5) What three qualities are most important for ensuring success as a young researcher?
Innovation, ambition, vision.