News

A new company, Simplus Diagnostics, has been founded by lab members and lab alumni!

Congrats to Jake Heggestad, PhD, David Kinnamon, PhD, and Cassio Fontes, PhD, for founding their new company Simplus Diagnostics (SimplusDx)! SimplusDx is the culmination of over a decade of research and development into the D4 platform—an ultrasensitive immunoassay specifically designed for…

SynIDPs as soluble protein expression tags

Exciting news from our lab! We are proud to announce the publication of our latest paper in Nature Communications, describing the development of new synthetic IDPs that allow for the soluble expression of difficult proteins in E. coli. These synthetic IDPs allowed our team to express and purify…

Josh Wedding

Congratulations to Josh and Amber on their beautiful wedding! We were thrilled to celebrate their marriage with a gorgeous ceremnoy and a reception so lit that there was a fire alarm on the 28th floor. We can confidently say that the Chilkoti lab excels both at the bench and at the dance.…

BMES Fall 2023

The Chilkoti Lab rolled in deep to the BMES conference! Anya, Max, Josh, Zach, and Dr. Yulia all gave excellent talks, while Parul, Joanna and Jonathan gave some really ~strong~ poster presentations! Chilkoti BMES Squad!

Chilkoti Lab Retreat Summer 2023

Kat, Rachael, Rachel, Afi, and Zach (a.k.a. The First Years and Zach) planned an incredible lab retreat! This year we went to the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, where we had a relaxing weekend of lab-based games, hiking, and generally relaxing. Things got heated during a close game of…

Sticky, Slippery, Water Repellent Channels Form Maze-Like, Gravity-Powered Biomedical Devices

Hamed's work was written up in a press release from the Duke Pratt School of Engineering! He created a gravity-powered microfluidic device that can control how droplets move and interact without any outside power. Great stuff! Read more here: https://pratt.duke.edu/about/news/gravity-power-…

Retreat Awards

The lab had a fantastic time at our departmental retreat, and more than a few congratulations are in order! Congrats to Anya for winning the BME Department Outstanding Departmental Service Award for four years of leadership in the BME PhD Peer Mentoring program! The peer mentoring program has…

Anya GRC Chair

A huge congratulations to Anya for being elected as one of the co-chairs for the 2025 Gordon Research Seminar on Cancer Nanotechnology! Anya had the opportunity to present her work and connect with brilliant scientists in the field. Learn more about the 2023 Cancer Nanotechnology GRS here. We…

Isolere Sale

Huge news from the entrepreneurial side of the Chilkoti lab: Isolere, a company founded in 2017 by Tosh, Kelli Luginbuhl, who recieved her PhD in the Chilkoti lab, and Joe McMahon, partner at Bioventure Partners, has been acquired by Donaldson Company, a global maker of filtration products.…

CBS17 story on Injectable radiotherapy gel

The good press continues! Dr. Schaal's pancreatic treatment was highlighted by CBS news - watch the segment here: https://www.cbs17.com/news/local-news/durham-county-news/duke-researcher...

NIH Story

Dr. Jeff Schaal's work on an injectable, radioactive gel was just highlighted on the NIH website! Congratulations Jeff and co-authors! Read more here: https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/injectable-radioactive-ge...

Congrats to

Congrats to Jeff Schaal, Garrett Kelly, Soumen Saha, Josh Milligan, Samagya Banskota, and Xinghai Li on their newest publication in Nature Biomedical Engineering! Jeff et al. attached a radioactive nuclide to ELPs to create an injectable "depot" that slowly irradiates pancreatic cancer.…

Ashutosh Chilkoti

A HUGE congratulations to Tosh on winning 2022 Outstanding Postdoc mentor at Duke!  From the press release: "A current postdoc wrote: When I met Tosh as a graduate student, I already had a postdoc position at another university and was determined to go there. However, Tosh's…

Awards from Retreat

Chilkoti lab had a great time at BME retreat, and we ~swept~ the end-of-the-year BME awards (and the social hours, of course)! Congratulations to:

NSF GRFP Winners

A huge congratulations to our NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP) winners Simone Wall, Zach Quinn, and Rhett Britton!  Simone's proposal was on "Simultaneous determination of SARS-CoV-2 infection and strain by highly specific antibody fragments" Zach's proposal was on "…