Awarded in 2013
Home Department: Chemistry
Faculty Advisors: Hongjie Dai (Chemistry), Brian Feldman (Pediatrics), Paul Utz (Medicine), and Samuel Strober (Medicine)

Research Title: A plasmonic chip for biomarker discovery and diagnosis of Type-1 diabetes

Research Description: 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 micro-array 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.

WHERE IS HE NOW?

Bo is the VP of chemistry and cofounder of Apostle, Inc.  Apostle is a biotechnology company in Sunnyvale, California, which has been accepted by the Stanford StartX accelerator.  Bo is also an associate professor at Southern University of Science and Technology of China.