Warren Chan, global leader in nanotechnology
E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship recipient
Warren Chan is a professor at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) at the University of Toronto, where
Warren Chan, global leader in nanotechnology
E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship recipient
Warren Chan is a professor at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) at the University of Toronto, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Bionanotechnology. Professor Chan works with quantum dots and nanoparticles—tiny particles that are helping researchers develop portable and cheaper diagnostic equipment for infectious diseases such as HIV, Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C, malaria and syphilis.
Chan has co-founded two companies, including Cytodiagnostics, which is among the top five nano-biotechnology companies in the world. He also contributes to national and international agencies examining the impact of nanomaterials and developing regulations governing their use.
Chan is one of three faculty members at U of T to receive an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowships this year. The fellowships were created to enhance the career development of outstanding and highly promising scientists and engineers who are faculty members at Canadian universities.
U of T News asked Chan about his research and the implications it holds for future generations.
Tell us about your research.
Everyone knows about barcodes; basically, these are a way for a store to keep track of its inventory. Well, we’re working on creating molecular barcodes, only we’ve done this with tiny beads and have put different coloured particles in them. Different beads will allow you to detect, based on colour signals, whether your system has a particular bug such as malaria or HIV.
What ends up happening is that the colour of the beads identifies the gene targets – for instance, green and orange beads can identify gene targets for malaria and HIV. But we also made it so that if that disease is present, it will bind to the surface of the target gene with another coloured particle, say red, to form a sandwich. If you don’t have malaria, you’ll see the green beads only, but you’ll see the green beads plus a red tint if malaria is present.
We took this technology and put it on a chip, so actually you can put it on a slip of paper or a glass slide. We’re developing a portable prototype so that you can basically spit on a strip of paper and an hour later you’ll be able to tell whether you’ve been infected with that disease based on the colours of the beads.
Currently we’re in a prototype phase. We’re trying to turn the laser and microscope that allows you to detect the coloured beads into a hand held device.
What kind of impact could this research have for society?
Take a disease like the flu, where it just walloped Toronto. But with this technology, you spit into a little slide, plus some dried reagents to crack out the bug, wait 20 minutes, and use your cell phone to view it and tell you whether t