Zerin Khan, Developing Treatment for Glioblastoma

Biomedical engineering just kind of drew me in because of the potential that we have to directly and tangibly help improve people's lives. So my research is focused on developing a treatment for glioblastoma, which is the most aggressive type of brain cancer, fun and adults. And what drew me in to this type of research is because it's really hard to treat cancer. One of the most devastating consequences of this deadly disease is that more than 90 percent, typically after diagnosis, they pass away within two years, about 15 months. So it's really devastating to hear those statistics. But that's kind of what motivates me in my work. You know, it's really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day exigencies of doing lab work or doctoral research. But I try to keep the big picture in mind. You know, the work that I'm doing, it could potentially leave a positive impact on someone's life with glioblastoma. So what my research is focused on is developing a method to make sure that we can stop the cancer from returning. And the way that our lab and our research is doing that is after surgically removing the tumor, there's a hole that's left behind in the brain. We're developing a hard to John, which is just a biomaterial that can go into that hole, fill it up, and then that hypothetical app like a magnet. So using some chemical and electrical signals that we can apply to the brain, we can control the cancer cell movement to move into the high jump. And then what we're planning on doing is using a non-invasive therapy like folk assault herself to blast that hydrogel containing the cancer software sound waves so that we can destroy any cancer cells trapped inside without requiring any surgery. I'm really grateful to my advisors, my primary advisor doctors thought verbiage and my advisor Dr. Eli, by solving that, they have just offered such expert guidance throughout my project. And they're always pushing to think about different innovative solutions. You know, how can you think outside the box? If you look at the lab environment that we have, it's an open space concept. So there are all these labs that are connected together. So that makes collaboration very easy. And the spirit of collaboration in our department is really high. We can achieve some real tangible outcomes to solve some really challenging and pressing problems in biomedical engineering. When we put our minds together, we can accomplish just so much more.