Tom Soh

Hyongsok (Tom) Soh, PhD, Professor, Departments of Electrical Engineering and Radiology, Departments (By courtesy) of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, Stanford University Schools of Engineering and Medicine 

Research Description: Dr. Soh is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Radiology, and his laboratory’s work lies at the interface of Engineering and Medicine. Soh’s group is known for developing advanced biosensors that can achieve rapid, sensitive, specific, and multiplexed molecular measurements, especially at the point of care. His lab has extensive expertise in developing electrochemical and optical biosensors, which are compatible with microfluidics and integrated electronic and photonic circuits. His lab invented “real-time biosensors” that can continuously measure specific biomarkers in live animals – with exquisite chemical specificity and sub- minute time resolution. This is one of the key technologies currently used in active collaborations with members of SDRC. This includes work with SDRC groups led by Appel, Kim and Maahs. Importantly, his lab is one of the leading research groups for generating aptamers (synthetic affinity reagents). His group was the first to utilize high-throughput sequencing (HTS) for aptamer discovery, which is now widely used. Most recently, his group invented the ‘particle display’ screening system, which transforms solution- phase aptamers into ‘aptamer particles’ that can be individually screened at high-throughput and reproducibly generate aptamers that can outperform best monoclonal antibodies in complex samples. This technique will be used to develop novel quantification methods for glucose, glucagon, insulin and other relevant biomolecules for diabetes and metabolic regulation. They have also developed a RT-ELISA that integrates aptamers and antibodies into a bead-based fluorescence sandwich immunoassay implemented in a custom microfluidic chip. This assay has been used for continuous quantification of glucose and insulin in the blood of live diabetic rats (Poudineh et al 2021) in collaboration with several SDRC members.

Selected relevant publications (Stanford DRC members in BOLD):

  1. Poudineh M, Maikawa CL, Ma EY, Pan J, Mamerow D, Hang Y, Baker SW, Beirami A, Yoshikawa A, Eisenstein M, Kim S, Vučković J, Appel EA, Soh HT. A fluorescence sandwich immunoassay for the real-time continuous detection of glucose and insulin in live animals. Nat Biomed Eng. 2021 Jan;5(1):53-63. doi: 10.1038/s41551-020-00661-1. PMID: 33349659. 

  2. Kesler V, Murmann B, Soh HT. Going beyond the Debye Length: Overcoming Charge Screening Limitations in Next-Generation Bioelectronic Sensors. ACS Nano. 2020 Dec 22;14(12):16194-16201. doi: 10.1021/acsnano.0c08622. PMID: 33226776; PMCID: PMC7761593. 

  3. Thompson IAP, Zheng L, Eisenstein M, Soh HT. Rational design of aptamer switches with programmable pH response. Nat Commun. 2020 Jun 10;11(1):2946. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-16808-2. PMID: 32522989; PMCID: PMC7286914.