Research Interests
Anatomical Pathology, Cancer, Multiomic Tumor Profiling, Personalized Medicine, Tumor Heterogeneity
Research Focus Teams
Cancer
Departments
School of Biomedical Engineering
Contact
Email: govind.kaigala@ubc.ca
Office Phone: phone: 604–827–1669
Publications
Lab Website
Dr. Govind Kaigala’s interests are in the areas of microscale fluid control, microscale molecular assays and technologies for personalized medicine. He is passionate about translational clinical/medical research. With his team, he strives to bring quantitation in biology and medicine by leveraging bioinstrumentation and micro-and nanosystems. He joined UBC in the Summer of 2022. Previously he was at the Research laboratory of IBM in Zurich for about 11 years where he was a Scientist and a Principal Investigator leading a team of researchers in the area of Precision Diagnostics. He earned his PhD from the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Oncology in 2009 from the University of Alberta where he developed microfluidic systems for genetic analysis. He completed an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University between the Microfluidics Laboratory in the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering and Dept. of Urology at the Stanford Medical School (VA Hospital).
He served as primary (or co-primary) advisor to > 30 trainees, and co-published > 80 journal articles, 1 book and > 45 patent families. His mentees have received in total > 30 awards.
2023 American Chemical Societies – Analytical Chemistry Young Innovator Award
2020 Fellow, Royal Society of Chemistry, UK
2020 IBM Research Division Accomplishment Award for work on Intelligent and quantitative immunostaining of tumor tissue sections, Switzerland
2018 IBM Master Inventor, Switzerland
2018 IBM Eminence and Excellence Award (Theme: Dare to create original ideas), Switzerland
2014 IBM Research Division Accomplishment Award for work on Microimmunohistochemistry, Switzerland
2014 University of Alberta Alumni Horizon Award, Canada
2011 Ramalingaswami Fellowship, India (declined)
2009 NSERC Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Canada
2008 Alberta Ingenuity Ph.D Graduate Studentship in Nanotechnology, Canada
2007 J. Gordin Kaplan Graduate Student Award, Canada
2006 Walter H. Jones Graduate Fellowship, Canada
2006 National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Post Graduate Award, Canada
2005 Translational Research Training in Cancer Fellowship, Canada
2005 National Research Council (NRC) Graduate Research Scholarship, Canada
2001 J. N Tata Endowment Scholarship, India
We engineer tools for biology and medicine!
We build these new and unique tools with the long-term goal of enabling discovery and rapid growth in biology and the translation of technology to applied medicine, thus accelerating their transformation from qualitative practices to quantitative sciences.
Laboratory name: Quantitative technologies for biology and medicine.
The focus of my teams research program is understanding and characterizing spatio-temporal biological processes, which requires interrogation of biological samples across different scales and innovations in technological devices and platforms, highly sensitive bioassays, and multimodal data integration within cell biology and pathology workflows. We will develop microscale devices and technologies for spatio-temporal analysis that can help interrogate several life-processes at different scales. Such technologies are strongly applicable in cancer research and for advancing the broader vision of personalized molecular medicine. Along with innovations in microtechnology, we will develop precision bioanalytics to help create robust solutions for studying and engineering cellular interactions and enabling next-generation quantitative molecular pathology. In addition to assisting in discovery-based research, these new methods may assist in improved patient stratification and diagnostics, and the multi-modal acquisition and data handling may also aid in better therapeutic decisions.
- Low-analyte detection systems. In performing spatio-temporal interrogation of biological samples, two main challenges arise, analytes are often retrieved from a few cells at low concentrations and low volumes using traditional recovery methods, and the transient changes in biomolecular content of cells are difficult to track and quantify due to slow and inefficient sampling. Capabilities to engineer devices, methods and systems will be developed in this module.
- Microscale fluid control platforms. Microscale flow control techniques are at the core of implementing spatial bioassays. We will take three approaches to build such microfluidic devices: (a) microfabrication, (b) micromachining and (c) rapid prototyping (PDMS and 3D printing). Assembly and post-processing of (a)-(c) will need to be performed. In addition, this module would need to be integrated with custom electronics and machined platforms. The goal will be to build a range of liquids scanning probes and reconfigurable microfluidic platforms.
- Cellular interface engineering. We are developing new ways to create unique biological interfaces to study heterogeneity in 2D and 3D.
- Multiomic data acquisition and integration. New approaches to process FFPE and frozen tissues to perform a range of biochemical and biophysical interrogation of tissues. A particular focus will be on quantitation of analytes including fluorescence, IR imaging and create new ways of multi-omic characterization. These platforms will also be capable run a computational framework to integrate this data.