Skip to main content

News

Glowing Praise: ChBE’s Vu on How 25 Years at UH Has Fueled His Medical Diagnostics Research
By
Alex Keimig
For the last 25 years, chemical and biomedical engineering research assistant professor Binh Vu, Ph.D., has made his home at the University of Houston.
For the last 25 years, chemical and biomedical engineering research assistant professor Binh Vu, Ph.D., has made his home at the University of Houston.
“I love engineering and medicine in science," said Vu.
“I love engineering and medicine in science," said Vu.

For the last 25 years, chemical and biomedical engineering research assistant professor Binh Vu, Ph.D., has made his home at the University of Houston. From enrolling as an undergraduate student and completing his bachelor's degree and Ph.D. to joining the faculty as an assistant professor, both the city and the university have been the perfect place for Vu to pursue his research passions.

“[Houston] was my first city when I came here from Vietnam. It’s very affordable, and UH was a very high-quality school, so that’s why I picked it. Now I have a lot of roots here,” he said.

“Since I have been here, so many of the buildings have been replaced; if someone wasn’t here during the development, they would hardly recognize anything anymore. The number of students has expanded, too. When I look at the numbers and the diversity of the state, I think they’re much greater now.”

In fact, the city has impacted the trajectory of his career just as much as his experiences at the University of Houston itself.

“I love engineering and medicine in science, and here in Houston, we have both of those in the Medical Center. When I was an undergrad, I was unsure about going to medical training for eight years; my passion pushed me from chemical engineering to the medical diagnostics field,” said Vu.

Following his graduate studies, Vu worked in a couple of start-ups in Boston and Houston, where he honed practical skills in medical diagnostic devices. His industry experience expanded his technical knowledge and provided insights into real-world challenges in medical diagnostics. These experiences laid the groundwork for his academic innovations, enabling him to translate commercial requirements into viable research solutions.

Currently, the Venn diagram of medical diagnostic technologies showcases fast, efficient testing methods on one side, highly-sensitive testing methods on the other side, and little overlap between them.

“My interest is to make diagnostic technology more widely available for use in low-resource settings,” Vu said. “The current diagnostic technologies are either not sensitive enough, or the ones that are sensitive enough require big instruments in a big lab somewhere. My goal is to either improve the very sensitive, complicated tests and make them easier to use in a low-resource setting, or improve the easy-to-use test to make them more sensitive.”

Low-resource settings may not meet standard global expectations for reliable electricity, lab space, or transportation, nor for specific healthcare infrastructure such as trained personnel, supplies, and equipment or specialized devices.

For specific interventions to work as intended in these regions, they must be simple, portable, and effective without fuss; that’s what led Vu to pursue the science of glow sticks — the ones partygoers often crack at concerts and holidays — as a serious approach for next-generation lateral flow immunoassay (LFA) tests in his work in the lab of Huffington-Woestemeyer Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering Richard C. Willson.

These tests can be administered and read anywhere a smartphone can go, and “this technology can be used for detecting all kinds of other things, including flu and HIV, but also COVID-19 and biodefense agents, and maybe toxins and environmental contaminants and pesticides in food,” said Willson and his team, as well as Vu and Research Professor Katerina Kourentzi.

Vu further cited time-sensitive home testing as another potential application for this technology, in addition to global low-resource settings.

“We saw with COVID-19 that people would try to get tested and have to wait for days to get their results. A few days make a big difference in how much you spread something that you may not even know you have. Spread becomes easier to control when you have the ability to know right away,” he said.

It’s impossible to say where life and science would have led him had Vu not begun his academic career in Space City two and a half decades ago, but at least one thing is certain: the future of his research at the University of Houston remains as bright as ever.

Share This Story: