Debajit Saha
Dr. Saha is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering. He joined MSU in Fall 2019 after pursuing a doctoral and postdoctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, he received a master’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and bachelor’s degree in Physics from Jadavpur University, India.
Dr. Saha's work encompasses systems neuroscience and neural engineering. Recent results from Dr. Saha’s lab clearly shows different volatile organic compounds (VOC) mixtures can be harnessed for disease detection. We tested the potential of detecting endometriosis via a biological olfaction-based sensor whereby leveraging the capability of the entire olfactory sensory system of an insect (locust) to discriminate gas mixtures emitted from endometriotic vs. healthy cells. Our results demonstrate that this approach can discriminate between multiple types of endometriotic, and non-endometriotic cell lines and analyses of neural responses show that individual neurons can distinguish each cell line by its ‘smell’ (i.e., emitted VOC mixture). The next goal for this study is to validate endometriosis detection using mouse and baboon urine samples (in collaboration with the Fazleabas lab at MSU).
Print
Email