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What if curing a chronic disease looked less like a daily pill and more like a tiny, wireless implant of living cells that quietly produces your medicine on demand? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Siddharth Krishnan, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, to explore the rapidly evolving frontier of bioelectronic medicine.
From his grandfather's soldering iron in Chennai, to a New Yorker article on John Rogers that changed his life, to a battery-free implant that has cured diabetes in mice for months, Siddharth walks through how his lab is engineering devices that combine living cells with thin-film electronics to deliver biologic drugs continuously, sense biomarkers in real time, and reshape what treatment for chronic disease can even look like. Along the way, he and Aaron dig into why oxygen is the hardest problem in implantable cell therapy, why the solution borrows physics from fuel cells, RFID credit cards, and photosynthesis, and why the future of medicine might involve all of us walking around with our own tiny bioreactors under the skin.
About the Guest
Siddharth Krishnan is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and a Terman Faculty Fellow, with a courtesy appointment in Bioengineering. His lab develops bioelectronic devices for sensing and therapeutics, with a particular focus on battery-free, wirelessly powered implants that combine inorganic electronics with living cells (so-called "living drug factories") to treat chronic diseases such as type 1 diabetes. He received his BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, earned his PhD in materials science and engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the lab of Prof. John Rogers, and was a K99/R00 Research Scientist in the labs of Profs. Daniel Anderson and Robert Langer at the Koch Institute at MIT and Boston Children's Hospital before joining Stanford. He is also a co-founder of Rhaeos Inc., a medical device company translating his graduate work on wireless wearable diagnostic tools for neurological surgery, and has been recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35.
Connect with Siddharth
https://siddharthrkrishnan.wordpress.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharth-krishnan-b2a79a8/
Chapters
00:00 – Cold Open: Wireless Power and Magnetic Fields
00:30 – Meet Siddharth Krishnan
01:08 – From Chennai to the Midwest
04:52 – The Light in Olin Library: From Humanities to Engineering
07:09 – A Grandfather, a Soldering Iron, and a Homemade Guitar Amp
10:47 – The New Yorker Article That Changed Everything
15:23 – Living Drug Factories: Engineering Cells Inside Implants
19:30 – Pancreatic Islets, Glucagon, and Type 1 Diabetes
24:24 – The Real Bottleneck: Solving the Oxygen Problem
27:38 – Borrowing Physics from Fuel Cells and Silicone Membranes
34:34 – Engineering Photosynthesis Inside the Body
36:18 – Wireless Power Harvesting and the RFID Trick
40:00 – Building a Bioelectronic Artificial Pancreas
46:44 – Why Life Stays Small Without Blood Supply
49:05 – From Drug Delivery to Living Biosensors
52:42 – Real-Time Inflammation Tracking and Long COVID
54:42 – Curing Mouse Diabetes for Months
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Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler
