Bo Zhang
Chemistry
Bio-X SIGF Fellow 2013/2014  
Profs. Hongjie Dai (Chemistry), Brian Feldman (Pediatrics), Paul Utz (Medicine), and Samuel Strober (Medicine)

Diagnosing type 1 diabetes is costly and time consuming; however, a delayed or missed diagnosis can result in severe illness or death. Bo is working on solving this diagnostic challenge from a physical chemistry perspective. Through incorporating a protein microarray on nano-engineered plasmonic film, detection of a small amount of diabetes-specific autoantibodies with significantly improved sensitivity becomes possible as the nano-engineered substrate amplifies fluorescent tags on detection antibodies. This protein chip allows for multiplexed quantification of more than one diabetes autoantibody from single patient sample in less than 1 hour. The simplicity of the approach could lead to broad adoption by scientists and clinicians in many fields for better proteomic analysis and diagnosis.