New Biomedical Engineering Professor Brings a Novel Approach to Disease

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Kartik Balachandran

While most medical research focuses on the chemical interactions between cells and other substances in the body, Kartik Balachandran, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, looks at how mechanical forces affect body tissues.

Balachandran explained that diseases such as hypertension exert a mechanical force on tissues, which often goes overlooked in the medical field. Currently, he is focusing on the effects of hypertension on heart valves. Patients with hypertension, or high blood pressure, experience increased pressure on bodily tissue, and Balachandran wants to find out how this increased mechanical stress contributes to heart valve problems.

Balachandran uses models of heart valves and other tissues to measure their response to mechanical forces. After he has quantified this mechanical environment,  he plans to use that data to create more complex systems that mimic what cells in a heart valve would experience when a patient has hypertension.

“Based on that, we can get an example of how cell shape changes, how cell mobility changes, and what kinds of proteins or genes are being expressed by the cell that are different compared to a healthy mechanical state,” Balachandran explained. He hopes this information will lead to more effective treatments.

Balachandran explained that he chose the University of Arkansas because he is excited to be part of the new biomedical engineering department. “I wanted to be in a place where I could have a quantifiable impact in developing  a program,” he said. In addition, he looks forward to collaborations with other Arkansas professors, as well as research centers and industry in the area.

Balachandran received a doctoral degree in bioengineering and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the National University of Singapore. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.