S. Balakrishna Pai

Dr. Balakrishna Pai is the Director of the Instructional Laboratories in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests are focused on understanding the basis for pathophysiology and developing novel strategies to intervene with the disease process. To achieve the above goals, he employs cellular and molecular approaches to understand the underlying mechanism of the disease state as well as to identify targets to direct therapeutics. Dr. Pai uses interdisciplinary methodologies for drug discovery and delivery using nanotechnology. As a Fogarty post-doctoral fellow at NIEHS, NIH, USA, he developed one of the first neoplastic transformation systems to study multistep tracheal epithelial carcinogenesis. As a Research Scientist at Yale University, he discovered novel antiviral and anticancer agents. He is a named inventor on multiple US and World patents for the aforementioned entities. One of the drugs that exhibit unique and potent activity against hepatitis B virus, which is in use in the clinic, delays progression to hepatocellular cancer and has been licensed to multiple companies. The National Cancer Institute directory states that the drug “has a long half-life and shows significant reduction of covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA), therefore the patient is less likely to have a relapse after treatment is discontinued.” At Georgia Tech, Dr. Pai has made significant contributions in neuroengineering as well as in the cancer therapeutics fields. One of the paradigm-changing technologies Dr. Pai worked on involved successfully migrating brain cancer cells out of the tumor, using electrospun nanofibers, into a cytotoxic sink. These findings were published in Nature Materials and were fast-tracked by the US FDA and are currently in clinical trials. Dr. Pai has also worked on lipid nanotube-mediated drug delivery, published in Brain, which has shown promise in clinical trials in dogs with spinal cord injury. Other contributions include nanoparticle-mediated nasal delivery of statins for hypertension and lipid microtube-encapsulated VEGF for enhanced vascularization. Dr. Pai is passionate about mentoring the next generation of inventors and innovators in the biomedical field. He employs a problem-based project-driven pedagogical approach to empower students to identify a problem in a field such as cancer and engineer intervention strategies by performing hands-on experimentation to work with the goal of achieving a solution. This approach has generated novel findings resulting in undergraduate authored publications, including as first authors, in peer-reviewed journals.