Two Engineering Faculty Tapped for NIH Trailblazer Awards

Two College of Engineering assistant professors have received Trailblazer Awards from the NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). The funding, $400,000 a piece over three years, will support the innovative research of Jinglei Ping, mechanical and industrial engineering, and Jun Yao, electrical and computer engineering, to improve diagnostic testing for such diseases as COVID-19, HIV, cancer and tick-borne illnesses.

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A Trailblazer Award allows new and early-stage investigators to pursue research projects of high interest to the NIBIB at the interface of the life sciences with engineering and the physical sciences. The research approaches are expected to have minimal or no preliminary data. 

Ping’s project, “Highly Integrated Nucleic-Acid Analysis Using Graphene Bioelectronics,” has the long-term goal of developing micro-total microRNA (small single-strand RNA molecules) detection technology that can be used globally for rapid, point-of-care clinical diagnoses in resource-limited settings. In particular, these next-generation sensors will be capable of providing accurate diagnosis results for COVID-19, HIV and cancer, among other diseases.

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Conventional microRNA-detection techniques – such as qPCR, microarray and next-generation sequencing – are centralized and require specialized setup, multiple manual procedures, highly trained staff, hours to days to provide results and are expensive. “As a result, they are difficult to be implemented at home, clinics and settings with restricted access to a central laboratory,” Ping says. “I will push back the frontier of the already high-sensitivity sensors based on graphene by orders of magnitude and integrate sample processing to graphene sensors.”

He explains the result of his research goal: “A microRNA blood test — from sample loading to readout generation — can be achieved in minutes on a miniaturized device with the size of a quarter.”

Yao’s project, “Bioinspired Mechanogating Biosensors for Real-time Biodetection,” aims to develop nanowire biosensors that are more resilient to body fluids and can attain better sensing resolution and specificity. 

“If we succeed, we will then investigate the potential of applying the sensor technology to the early detection of tick-borne diseases,” Yao says. Working with Guang Xu, research professor of microbiology and an expert on tick-borne disease diagnosis, Yao says the goal is to potentially improve what’s lacking in current diagnostics. 

“It’s a high-risk, high-impact project fitting into the award’s aim,” he says.