Research Projects

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the prominent cause of death worldwide, and India accounts for one-fifth of these fatalities, particularly among the younger population. The consequences of CVDs are associated with heart failure, stroke, myocardial infarction, arrhythmia, myocardial infarction, and heart valve complications. The cost of CVD treatment is very expensive; moreover, in comparison to other chronic illnesses, the symptoms of CVD proliferate rapidly. Therefore, early diagnosis and possible treatment are extremely important for the effective management of CVDs. With the advancement of nanobiotechnology, the accurate diagnosis, monitoring, and prevention of CVDs is achievable with biosensing and bioimaging devices. The sensing of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is one of the most promising, safe, and noninvasive approaches for the early diagnosis of CVDs. VOCs are a wide group of carbon-based chemicals with a range of retention time and boiling point (50 °C to 260 °C), those are emitted from the patient’s body through exhaled breath as well as present in other specimens like urine, blood, saliva, sweat, and cerebrospinal fluid. The VOCs are associated with various types of diseases and provides individual’s health status. Current available techniques for the detection of CVDs rely on the immunoassays and blood tests, which take several hours for the diagnosis. Ultrasmall metal nanoclusters within the size ˂ 3 nm are highly luminescent in nature, and have great potential for sensitive detection of VOCs related to CVDs as well as for the optical imaging of cardiac cell lines. In this project, highly luminescent amino acid/protein templated nanoclusters will be synthesized, which can act as a biological probe for the rapid detection of VOCs related to CVDs. The biocompatible NCs will be developed for the selective sensing of the VOCs emitted with the biofluids such as urine, saliva, and cerebrospinal fluid. These NCs-based paper device will be used for the diagnosis of the multiple VOCs quantifying the level of different chronic diseases. Over the past few decades, growing evidence on the beneficial improvement of heart diseases after cell therapy has drawn much attention on the development of novel imaging tools for the mapping of diseased cardiac and heart cell lines. Optical imaging through novel fluorescent probes can provide mechanistic insight into molecular and cellular functions that are vital for the early diagnosis of cardiac diseases. The synthesized biocompatible, luminescent NCs will be used for the bioimaging of the cardiac cell lines (e.g., Embryonic rat H9c2 cardiomyoblasts cell lines) for the precise diagnosis and monitoring of CVDs. We believe that these early diagnoses by the sensing of CVDs related VOCs and bioimaging of the diseased cardiac cells using the biocompatible ultrasmall NCs will provide effective management of CVDs progression and advanced cardiovascular health care.