Suresh Kumar Thallapuranam
University of Arkansas, AR·Biochemistry
Chronic wounds, such as foot ulcers in people with diabetes, can stay open for months. They involve lasting inflammation, poor blood supply and infection.
- Fields
Biochemistry
Biomedical Engineering
Chemistry
- Topics
chronic wounds
diabetic wound healing
diabetic foot ulcer
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Feb 2031
What they work on
- Design a hyperstable, bioactive dimer that fuses the growth factors FGF1 and FGF2, and create more stable variants that resist breakdown at the wound site.
- Develop injectable negatively charged hydrogels made of gelatin-modified P(OEGA-co-AA) that release FGF1-FGF2 dimer variants slowly into diabetic skin wounds.
- Track healing with multiphoton imaging of NADH and FAD autofluorescence and collagen signals, and measure new blood vessel growth with diffuse reflectance spectroscopy.
- Provide fee-based bioenergetic profiling of cells and tissues, including respiration, ATP production and glycolysis, plus flow-cytometry measurements of mitochondrial membrane potential and reactive oxygen species.
- Maintain and expand bioenergetics equipment and train researchers in metabolic experimental design, sample preparation, data acquisition and analysis.
More about the research
Growth factors, small signaling proteins that tell tissue to repair, could help these wounds heal. In practice, though, they break down fast in the body and are hard to deliver steadily. The lab's work spans two efforts: designing longer-lasting growth-factor therapies for wound healing, and running a shared facility that measures how cells produce and use energy.
Why it matters
Chronic wounds harm the health and quality of life of many people with diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and advanced wound care costs over $10 billion a year in the U.S. More stable growth factors, released slowly from a protective hydrogel dressing, could improve healing of these ulcers. Non-invasive imaging could help judge whether new wound therapies work. The bioenergetics core gives Arkansas researchers access to measurements of cell energy use for studying metabolism in health and disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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New York University, NY·Biomedical Engineering
Expand a library of positively charged supercharged proteins with virus-derived tags to help siRNA particles escape endosomes, the membrane bubbles that trap cargo inside cells, while keeping strong RNA binding, using computationally informed design.
Evgeny Pavlov
New York University, NY·Biochemistry
Identify which molecular mechanisms of mitochondrial permeability transition operate under specific stress conditions, such as calcium and reactive oxygen species imbalance, using the lab's animal and cell disease models.
Mohamadmahdi Samandari
Old Dominion University, VA·Biomedical Engineering
Characterize microneedle-like gelatin drug depots that are printed directly inside a defect, and measure how quickly they release drugs in laboratory experiments.
The school
University of Arkansas: 12 labs on PI Pages, $231M a year on research, 179 research doctorates a year.
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