Biomedical internship yielded lively experience

Jennifer Pocock — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 18:22:51 +0000

Biomedical internship yielded lively experience Jennifer Pocock Fri, 08/22/2025 - 14:22

Jacob Lockey improved his pipette and professional skills in his summer at Athari Biosciences.

Jacob Lockey (right) with his Athari Biosciences mentors, Sanskruthi Sreepangi (middle) and Mahaniya Srinivasan (left).

When Lockey, a bioengineering major through the bachelor’s accelerated master’s program at �鶹��Ƶ, accepted his internship at Athari Biosciences, he knew that he would have a different experience than his fellow students at larger companies.

Athari is a small health equity accelerator lab in Sterling, Virginia, that performs biomedical R&D, lab testing, and educational services. Lockey is interested in nanomedicine, especially researching nanocarriers.

“A nanocarrier is a nanoparticle that has been engineered to hold something—in some cases, a drug—and deliver it to a target, such as a cancer cell,” he said. “The internship was very useful for stuff I’d be doing in the future.”

Lockey worked on several different projects, including helping calibrate a robot that automates assays (experiments or tests). He also optimized and built different assays, including one using E. coli bacteria to see how it would react to novel antibacterial drugs. This allowed him to explore options for new drugs that could not only kill E. coli bacteria but also make it less likely to become drug resistant.

“My favorite part overall was the last day,” he said. “Athari hosted a friends and family presentation day. We got to present our work in what would be a real scientific setting, but it was with the C-suite at Athari and our friends. It was the culmination of everything we did at the company all at once.”

Lockey said that George �鶹��Ƶ prepared him “a million percent” for the internship through both his technical classes and the soft skills he gained during group work and hands-on projects. “The biggest thing I’ve gotten from school was approaching problem solving and thinking like an engineer. Going from an academic setting to a corporate setting, �鶹��Ƶ did a great job in helping us get there.”

And when he got there, the experience was top-notch. “Athari was very warm and welcoming,” he said. “Taking on interns is a big lift for a small company, but they put a huge emphasis on training and developing the next generation. I learned tons of new skills that I didn’t think I’d get to learn.”

Some of these included wet lab experience, assay development, and testing. Not to mention pipette work. “I have shaky hands and they really helped me. By the end, I was pipetting like a pro.”

Topics

CEC internships

Biomedical

internships

College of Engineering and Computing

Students

Bioengineering

CEC students

How nano roughness could smooth out clotting risks

Nathan Kahl — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 18:39:25 +0000

How nano roughness could smooth out clotting risks Nathan Kahl Thu, 09/05/2024 - 14:39

When doctors and medical technicians place a device in the human body, any number of things can go wrong. Ensuring the materials used in those devices interact appropriately and safely with human tissue is a key component to positive long-term health outcomes.

Ketul Popat, chair bioengineering department.

Photo by Office of University Branding

Ketul Popat, chair of the �鶹��Ƶ Department of Bioengineering and a medical materials expert, has a grant from the National Institutes of Health for approximately $200,000 to address an unintended consequence of device implementation—blood clots.

As many as 6% of the more-than one million Americans who have a stent or heart valve implanted each year face a risk of thrombosis, a potentially deadly condition occurring when a clot blocks a blood vessel. For Popat and his collaborators, it’s not just about what the material is made of, but the nature of the very surface of the material.

But Popat said, “Sometimes we just put materials in the body because they work, knowing they are going to fail in several years and we’ll replace them. So it becomes really important to design the surface of the material of an implant so that when it is in contact with tissue, it is not a mismatch to the structural features of the tissue.”

Our blood’s ability to clot is generally a welcomed response, preventing excessive bleeding following an injury and helping to start and speed the healing process. Of course, this characteristic can also be problematic, resulting in clots that can lead to strokes, heart attacks, and other dangers.

A depiction of a stent in a vein. iStock photo

Popat believes a way to decrease clotting that may occur because of the devices is with surface manipulation, tricking the blood cells, in a sense. “Rough surfaces have different clotting properties than smooth surfaces. Now if we can create rough surfaces that are systematic and repeatable, the cells in the blood will sense these nano features and perform their function differently than if they move past a flat surface.” Popat says he and colleagues believe the nano rough surfaces work well at reducing blood clots because blood cells are used to it–surfaces of the blood vessels they flow through have a similar nanostructure.

Microscopic image of titania nanotubes on the surface of titanium, each measuring approximately 100 nanometers across. Photo provided

In addition to manipulating the surface material, the researchers are coating them with a substance tanfloc, a condensed tannin that is typically used for water purification. Previous studies show that the combination of these techniques–rough nanosurfaces covered in tanfloc–reduces the likelihood of blood clots.

The unpredictability of clotting makes this research particularly important, especially in a world where approximately 20 million people die every year due to cardiovascular disease.

“Some people get a stent, and they are fine for the rest of their lives, and some people get a stent and in the first few years they experience blood clotting. It’s very patient-specific, and unfortunately you just don’t know until you put it in,” Popat said.

Popat said the goal goes beyond simply preventing the clots. “Eventually, we want the cells around the stent to grow on top of the stent and over it. We don’t just want to control clotting, but we also want the stent to truly integrate with, and become part of, the body.”

Check out Bioengineering at George �鶹��Ƶ

In This Story

Ketul Popat

Topics

Biomedical

Biomedical internship yielded lively experience

Topics

How nano roughness could smooth out clotting risks

In This Story

Related News

Topics