What is in your sweat and what can it mean for health and disease?​

Vishnu Shankar, M.S.
Department of Chemistry
Stanford University




Please see zoom details below:
Webinar URL: https://stanford.zoom.us/s/99817512229
Dial: +1 650 724 9799 or +1 833 302 1536 (Toll Free)
Webinar ID: 998 1751 2229
Password: 489011


Tuesday, July 21, 2020
11:00am - 12:00pm Seminar & Discussion

ABSTRACT
Vishnu Shankar recently graduated with his master’s degree in computer science, with a specialization in artificial intelligence from Stanford University. He completed his bachelor’s degree with honors in mathematical and computational sciences in 2018, also at Stanford, with his senior thesis on Bayesian networks for incorporating effect modifiers in meta-analysis.  In addition, his background spans biology, mathematics, chemistry, statistics, operations research, physics, and computing. Vishnu has published 6 papers and 3 articles in fields including protein structural prediction, comparison of clinical guidelines cost-effectiveness in type 2 diabetes, development of programs to combat mental illness, cancer diagnosis with analytical chemistry and machine learning, and related areas.   He is also the founder of the CARES organization to support peer student wellness at college campuses, for which he won the Asoka Youth Changemaker award sponsored by Boehringer Ingelheim.  Vishnu has enthusiastically pursued science since his middle school days and has worked on demonstrating the possibilities of DNA computing, simulating protein folding, studying the genetic modifications in fruits and vegetables, and more. He has been recognized for his scientific research as an Intel Science Talent finalist, Google Science Fair Regional finalist, recipient of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Excellence award for his work on epidemiology modeling.  Vishnu has interned at Caltech and Genentech, where he applied experimental techniques to purify and study protein behavior including dialysis, titration, chromatography for early stage drug development.  He was also selected as one of the two high school students to represent the western US Confucius Institute in Student Leaders Exchange Program in China as a non-native Mandarin speaker.


ABOUT VISHNU SHANKAR
Sweat is a complex fluid known to be rich in electrolytes, small molecules, and fatty acids. Although adults can sweat up to 10 liters per day, little is still known about the chemical composition of sweat, how this changes, and what are its implications for health and disease. We demonstrate a powerful approach to help elucidate this link, where collecting samples simply requires swabbing a glass slide across one’s forehead in less than 30 seconds. Using the combination of desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry and statistical machine learning, our approach can successfully detect over 10,000 metabolites in sweat and identify metabolic changes in the sweat profile related to gender, age, and disease. As an example, we demonstrate in a cohort of 65 subjects the possibility of using just a few metabolites detected in sweat to successfully identify patients with renal disease. More generally, our approach suggests the possibility of using the sweat profile to non-invasively assess individual risk for metabolic diseases in the theme of “Precision Medicine.”


Hosted by: Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, M.D., Ph.D.
Sponsored by: the PHIND Center and Department of Radiology