Empowered Patient Podcast How Laboratory Robots Are Transforming Hydrogel Testing with Sinan Gölhan GelTech
Sinan Gölhan, Founder and CEO of GelTech, describes the characteristics and applications for hydrogels, which are bio-friendly, super-absorbent materials similar to natural tissue. In cancer treatments, hydrogels offer a way to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to a tumor, which can significantly increase the accuracy and efficacy of the drug. GelTech has developed a robotic instrument to streamline the time-consuming testing process for new hydrogel treatments, automating repetitive actions, reducing inconsistencies, and enabling 24/7 testing capabilities.
Sinan explains, "You could think of hydrogels like sponges. They're super absorbent, bio-friendly materials that are made of water. For this reason, scientists like myself essentially consider them the next best thing to natural tissue. Just like our own bodies, they're mostly made up of water. They have great applications in drug delivery, implant cosmetics, all these modern hydrogel face masks, and other types of substances."
"I worked in hydrogel research for many years after seeing my mother and both my grandmothers go through chemotherapy treatments. I became motivated to make these treatments more effective, smarter, more targeted, and hydrogel-like. I just realized the main limitation is that to even make one of these treatments, it costs the company around a billion dollars over 10 years to figure out if this hydrogel is even going to work. And most of this was due to manual testing. It's scientists doing the same tests over and over again. It's very tedious, takes a long time, and it's very expensive to get a scientist to do this all day, every day. After feeling like a robot during the same test over and over again, I said, ‘I want to build a robot that automates this.' The company I was working for loved it and I essentially started focusing on that for the rest of my career."
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