by Puneetha Goli
Did you know that nearly 1.35 million people die each year as a result of traffic crashes? Or that injuries sustained from these accidents are the leading cause of death for people ages 5 to 29 (1)? Currently, those injured in accidents are required to wait for personnel to arrive and scope out the scene before any medical help from a wound care provider can be given. However, imagine if instead, in the time a person waits for emergency services, a “smart” band aid could be applied immediately to the wound, setting the wound until advanced medical follow-up is available.
This is exactly what Dr. Swathi Balaji, an assistant professor of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine, is working toward. Alongside Dr. Taiyun Chi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, Dr. Balaji hopes to develop an artificial intelligence-assisted smart wound dressing to speed up the wound healing process.
Dr. Balaji received a PhD in biomedical engineering from the University of Cincinnati after she fell in love with the applications of the field and recognized the impact she could make by combining her foundation in mechanical engineering with bioengineering.
“I came for a Masters in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cincinnati,” said Dr. Balaji. “I loved the program, …[but] it became very obvious that we were [only] making small incremental changes.” Her Masters work served as a turning point in which she realized she wanted to enter a field where she could make a more long-term impact, leading her to pursue a PhD in bioengineering. “There was so much going on in terms of orthopedic research, biomaterials, regenerative tissue applications, so I was very fascinated with that,” said Balaji.
The work that Dr. Balaji conducted as a PhD student on tissue engineering, as well as her subsequent work on understanding the regenerative mechanisms of fetuses has inspired her current projects at Baylor. The goals of her lab are to understand intracellular communications and how they translate into an individual’s response to injury, scarring, and wound healing. Through examining healing mechanisms in mouse models, Dr. Balaji has worked to establish a pipeline, ranging from basic investigations to more complex interactions with biomaterials to address her lab’s goals.
Dr. Balaji’s interest in regenerative wound healing coupled with calls of action from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to better understand what is occurring at the wound scene is what led to a collaboration between her and Dr. Chi and ultimately gave birth to the idea of this innovative smart wound dressing (2).
Dr. Chi’s lab is working on the development of novel biology-microelectronics hybrid systems. The technology entails using advanced integrated circuits and microfabrication techniques - the same process of fabricating CPU, memory, and wireless transceivers chips in our cellphones and tablets (3) - to create miniature-sized electronic biosensors and bioactuators (4). Although the technology already exists, his sensors are unique in that they are one of the first that can record multiple biomarkers simultaneously and on a flexible membrane, ideal for human skin. Recognizing the potential interdisciplinary overlap, the two began discussing the possibility of integrating the research done in Dr.Balaji’s lab with Dr.Chi’s sensors in order to create a machine-learning system that would be capable of collecting information from a wound site and administering an individualized treatment.
“It’s a very exciting project...,” said Dr.Balaji. “We started off with simple machine learning but the goal is to ultimately go into more advanced predictive modeling and make it smarter as we go on, and the dream would be ... to deploy this in the battlefield or when there is an emergency or when there is an accident - to be able to slap it on and let the wound healing happen right from the get-go.”
Currently, the project is in its initial stages. The teams have worked to perfect their respective independent technologies—Dr.Balaji’s team has developed their understanding of the science using animal models, while Dr.Chi’s team has refined the sensors and actuators. Now, they are currently working to integrate both of these components and apply them to a wound site.
However, despite the preliminary nature of her work, Dr.Balaji already sees multiple avenues for the future of her research. One of her goals is to promote this niche field of science in an academic environment: “I think our goal is to develop this new field of biology - machine learning microelectronics hybrid systems - either as a new course for undergraduate or graduate education or a new pipeline for promoting STEM-based education,” said Balaji. In addition to the educational angle, Dr. Balaji expressed an interest in getting the SMART wound dressing patented. In the future, she hopes for a world in which her SMART wound dressing could have a wide range of applications - from healing a scratch from a playground fall to something more complicated such as a burn wound.
The potential of Dr.Balaji’s and Dr.Chi’s project has been recognized by the John S. Dunn Foundation Collaborative Research Award Program and the duo was awarded the 2020 John S. Dunn Collaborative Research Awards which was established to “fund projects with high potential for impacting human health”(5). “We were very excited..[and] we see a lot of potential,” Dr.Balaji said of winning the award. She believes the award will give her and Dr. Chi’s team the necessary resources to dedicate the time and effort to produce a final product that can be tested and examined. “I think at the current stage, we have all the different pieces of the puzzle, and over the course of the next two years, ...the Dunn Award is really going to help us bring our technology together. To come up with an idea that is received very well makes it a very, very rewarding experience.”
References
Road traffic injuries https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries (accessed Feb 24, 2021).
Intelligent Healing for Complex Wounds https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-02-06a (accessed Mar 3, 2021).
https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-cmos-2625826
https://www.nature.com/subjects/biosensors
Funding Opportunities – Gulf Coast Consortia https://www.gulfcoastconsortia.org/home/research/funding-opportunities/ (accessed Feb 24, 2021).