BE Seminar: “End-to-End Precision Medicine: Personalized Sensing, Targeted Diagnostics, and Therapeutic Discovery” (Ava Soleimany)

This seminar will be held live and broadcast on zoom – check email for zoom link or contact ksas@seas.upenn.edu.

Precision medicine envisions a world where diagnostic and therapeutic opportunities are intelligently tailored to individual patient needs. Achieving this vision necessitates access to high quality, accurate, and individualized information about disease state. Engineered probes that sense disease activity — dynamically and directly within the body — could provide this information by generating signals that functionally measure the state of one’s disease.

In this talk, I will discuss my work in engineering a novel class of nanoscale sensors that directly query disease microenvironments by measuring the activity of proteases, enzymes directly involved in many diseases including cancer. I will share how we can leverage the rich, functional data generated by these sensors to design and deploy novel, expressive, and high-fidelity machine learning models to power individualized diagnostic decision-making. Finally, I show how we can close the precision medicine loop to advance new treatment strategies, through the design of a novel algorithm for guided and robust therapeutic discovery. Together, this talk will present a new paradigm for creating translational engineering and algorithmic advances across all stages of personalized disease management: from functional understanding of biological mechanisms, to early disease interception, to intelligent data-driven treatment design.