Amin Arbabian

Amin Arbabian, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Research Description: Dr. Arbabian’s team explores the design of emerging and hybrid medical imaging modalities, and investigates new technologies for wireless implants in the Biomedical field. His group develops circuits and systems for implantable and ingestible medical devices to enable next-generation therapies and diagnostics. Their work focuses on miniaturization of these devices, design of efficient and robust wireless power/data links, and end-to-end system design for various biomedical applications, including neural stimulation, in vivo biosensing, imaging, and closed-loop drug delivery. Through collaborations with SDRC members, including Drs. Annes and Zare, his team is investigating the unmet challenge of treating hypoglycemia. Current treatments involve either oral glucose intake, or injections of dextrose or glucagon with heavy reliance on caregivers, and lack of immediate treatment for severe hypoglycemia. The goal of his group is to develop a wireless, programmable, and closed-loop implantable drug delivery system (IDDS) that can deliver anti-hypoglycemic drugs on demand, and in response to low or falling glucose levels in a diabetic patient, and sufficiently miniaturized to allow minimally invasive implantation. This could lead to a paradigm shift for how hypoglycemia is treated is the future, and serve as a “platform” for significantly improving treatment of other chronic diseases that require programmed, precise and localized drug delivery.

Selected relevant publications (SDRC Members in BOLD):

  1. Chien JC, Baker SW, Soh HT, Arbabian A. Design and Analysis of a Sample-and-Hold CMOS Electrochemical Sensor for Aptamer-based Therapeutic Drug Monitoring. IEEE J Solid-State Circuits. 2020 Nov;55(11):2914-2929. doi:10.1109/jssc.2020.3020789. PMID: 33343021; PMCID: PMC7742970.

  2. Chang TC, Wang M, Arbabian A. Multi-Access Networking with Wireless Ultrasound-Powered Implants. IEEE Biomed Circuits Syst Conf. 2019 Oct; 2019:10.1109/BIOCAS.2019.8919144. doi:10.1109/BIOCAS.2019.8919144. PMID: 31989118; PMCID: PMC6984356.

  3. Baltsavias S, Van Treuren W, Weber MJ, Charthad J, Baker S, Sonnenburg JL, Arbabian A. In Vivo Wireless Sensors for Gut Microbiome Redox Monitoring. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2020 Jul;67(7):1821-1830. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2019.2948575. Epub 2019 Oct 21. PMID: 31634824; PMCID: PMC7170758.

  4. Walden C, Soneson J, Weber MJ, Charthad J, Chia Chang T, Arbabian A, Myers M. Thermal analysis of ultrasound-powered miniaturized implants: A tissue-phantom study. J Acoust Soc Am. 2018 Jun;143(6):3373. doi: 10.1121/1.5040470. PMID: 29960486.