Meet Breakout Labs Ambassador, Kinshuk Mitra

Welcome to Meet Our Ambassadors — a weekly series that highlights each of the talented PhD students doubling as volunteers who represent Breakout Labs at their research universities and local events.

This week’s ambassador is Kinshuk Mitra who is pursuing his PhD in Bioengineering at Rice University.

Inspired by the power of the immune system, Kinshuk is interested in the possible manipulation and engineering of the immune system to make even stronger therapeutics. He finds creating synthetic biomarkers for bioengineered therapies extremely empowering. “For so many of the newer cell based therapies (including immunotherapies), the clinician can only record improvements in the patient,” he says. “They cannot track how the injected cell therapies are behaving, why they fail or why they harm the patient. These therapies lack a natural molecule or marker that is easy to track. Synthetic biomarkers circumvent that by allowing us to engineer an easy to read marker to report on an important biological process occurring directly in the cell.”

Additionally, he is inspired by scientist, inventor and entrepreneur Dr. Stephen Quake, whose research is concerned with developing new approaches to biological measurement and applying these approaches to problems of both fundamental and medical interest.

He became a Breakout Labs Ambassador to connect with powerful deep science startups. He’s enjoyed chatting with biotech startups (who have been through the Texas Medical Center in addition to Breakout Labs) about taking their research and discoveries out of the lab and placing their science in the marketplace.

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If you enjoyed our bio on Kinshuk, give us a 👏 . If you’re interested in the Breakout Labs Ambassador program, click here.