seminar_MIT-XuanheZhao

Merging Humans and Machines: Innovation and Translation

Presenter: Prof. Xuanhe Zhao
Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor
MIT

Conflict of Interest Declaration

1. SanaHeal
2. Pelva
3. CIRS
4. Magnendo
5. Obit
6. Sonologi

Note: All of these companies are startups founded by Prof. Zhao’s former students, or his students serve as key members of their teams.

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Zhao Lab mission: Merging Humans and Machines

Impact one: better health in wearable devices, medical equipment, and medical implants.
Impact two: understanding brain.
Impact three: future of humans and society

The Grand Challenge

Core Question:
How can we merge soft, wet, living tissues with hard, dry, abiotic devices—and maintain long-term, robust, non-fibrotic interfaces?

Scientific Focus:

Unconventional polymer networks with extreme properties

Adhesive, non-fibrotic interfaces

Challenges of Fibrotic Encapsulation

From Robert Langer
The major challenge is to create a material that is not encapsulated by fibrous tissue.
Achieving this requires developing super-biocompatible materials.

Key Difficulties:

• Strongly dependent on the specific drug or material
• Most current methods mitigate, rather than fully prevent, fibrosis

Inconsistent outcomes across organs, species, and experimental batches

Personal Reflections:

Listening to a leading figure like Prof. Zhao, I realized I’m still figuring out how to capture such broad, visionary ideas effectively. Talks like this often outline the overall architecture of a lab’s research rather than delving into the technical details.

I hope that, before I graduate, I’ll discover a way to bridge the gap—translating these big-picture visions into concrete, technical insights I can apply to my own work.