Instructional Laboratories – Biomedical Engineering

Whitaker Building, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering on Georgia Tech Campus
Instructional Laboratories at GT BME
"We challenge our students to own their laboratory experiences and engineer strategies to interfere with the physiological processes that lead to cancer. Student teams develop their own comprehensive research proposals, which then become the foundation for experimental validation in the lab and employing relevant techniques.”
Induction of Apoptosis (programmed cell death) in glioblastoma (brain cancer cells) using an inhibitor of cancer-specific activated pathway

About:

Instructional Laboratories of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University is located in the Whitaker Building at the Georgia Tech campus. Several research courses are supported by the Instructional Laboratories including Quantitative Engineering Physiology I & II, Cellular and Tissue Engineering courses. Resources and support are provided for other graduate and undergraduate courses (for details, see courses section). The Laboratories, in addition to several biosafety cabinets and CO₂ incubators, also house state of the art instrumentation including Flow cytometers, QuantStudio Real Time PCR system, QIAcube, Nanodrop, fluorescent and phase contrast microscopes with live cell imaging capabilities, IR imager for Western analysis, plate readers, hypoxia incubator, electrospinning equipment and set up for nanoparticle and microparticle fabrication. Undergraduate as well as graduate students use the instrumentation and resources for their research. A major focus of the research is student-initiated research projects involving engineered strategies to tackle real world medical problems by performing hands-on experimentation that generate solutions and create value for the biomedical field.

News/Events:

Manuscript published in Cancer Informatics December 13, 2021 – ” Computational Identification of Stearic Acid as a Potential PDK1 Inhibitor and In Vitro Validation of Stearic Acid as Colon Cancer Therapeutic in Combination with 5-Fluorouracil”.

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Publication: WIP: A novel problem-driven learning laboratory course in which biomedical engineering students conduct experiments of their own design to answer an authentic research question: Link: https://peer.asee.org/authors/53999 January 10, 2023
Publication in Cancer Treatment and Research Communications February 17, 2021
Our manuscript "Cellular molecular and proteomic profiling deciphers the SIRT1 controlled cell death pathways in esophageal adenocarcinoma cells" published in Cancer Treatment and Research Communications. Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468294220301064
Bala Pai's cancer research strategy and entrepreneurial mindset article featured in ASEE PRISM January 28, 2020
Bala Pai's article "Fighting the Big C with the 3c's" is featured in the January issue of PRISM, a publication of the American Association for Engineering Education.