Diagnostics Grand Rounds brings clinicians with unmet needs to the Wyss Institute. The goal of these sessions is to inform technology developers about important clinical problems that can help them direct their technology development efforts. Presenters are asked to identify diagnostic needs that will have an impact on the quality of care they deliver.
Pathology is the study of disease: its etiology, pathogenesis, clinical manifestations, and, ultimately, its diagnosis. In this talk, we will orient you to how pathology is practiced within its two main divisions, anatomic and clinical, with a particular focus on the diagnostic services at Brigham and Women's Hospital. We will then present a set of "hard-to-biopsy" entities, i.e., diseases where the tissue or biofluids that would settle the diagnosis are inaccessible, precarious to obtain, or uninformative, and use them to map both where the field currently stands and where the diagnostic needs are greatest.
Instructor in Pathology, Harvard Medical School;
Research/Clinical Fellow, Department of Pathology, Brigham and Women's Hospital;
Research/Clinical Fellow in Pathology, Wyss Institute
 Arek Melkonian is an Instructor in Pathology at Harvard Medical School and a Research/Clinical Fellow in the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He earned his B.S. in Physical Chemistry and M.S. in Materials Science & Engineering at UCLA, followed by his M.D. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Stanford, where his doctoral work in the Khosla lab investigated the allostery of transglutaminase 2 and its role in coeliac disease. His current research in the Walt lab spans single-molecule enzymology, extracellular vesicle engineering, and next-generation diagnostics.
Research/Clinical Fellow, Department of Pathology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital;
Research/Clinical Fellow in Pathology, Harvard Medical School;
Research/Clinical Fellow in Pathology, Wyss Institute
Chih-Ping Mao, MD, PhD, is a Research and Clinical Fellow in Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. He earned his BS in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Johns Hopkins University and his MD and PhD in Immunology from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he investigated mechanisms of cancer immune escape and devised strategies to overcome tumor immune tolerance. His current research focuses on developing ultrasensitive RNA and protein profiling technologies for tissue-resolved liquid biopsy, with applications in oncology and neurodegenerative disease.
