Dr. Sahadev Shankarappa, Assistant Professor, Amrita Center for Nanosciences and Molecular Medicine, authored on a very prestigious high impact scientific journal of the National Academy of Sciences- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

Dr. Sahadev, in collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),Cambridge and Harvard, published a paper titled “Repeatable and adjustable on-demand sciatic nerve block with phototriggerable liposomes.” 

Scientists affiliated with Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Amrita Center for Nanosciences and Molecular Medicine have recently developed tiny liposomes filled with a toxin that can block nerve signals. The specialty of these liposomes is that they are sensitive to infra-red light and when injected around a peripheral nerve, can be triggered to produce ‘on-demand analgesia’. This technology would potentially allow patients to adjust the timing, duration, and intensity of local anesthesia in painful parts of the body. The results from this study have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), and the lead scientists of this study are Professor’s Robert Langer and Daniel Kohane. 

Prior to joining Amrita, Dr. Sahadev was a Post-doctoral Fellow with Professor Langer and Dr. Kohane, and has since been working on developing technology for managing pain. Even after his tenure at MIT, Dr. Sahadev has maintained scientific connections with his post-doctoral lab and plans to continue collaborating and working on various technologies for controlling pain. Currently, Dr. Sahadev, along with Dr. Daniel Kohane, is exploring the feasibility of pain-relieving sutures in pre-clinical studies.

The official scientific journal of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), is published since 1915. With broad coverage, spanning the biological, physical, and social sciences, the journal publishes original research of exceptional importance alongside scientific reviews, commentaries, and letters. PNAS is the second most cited scientificjournal across all fields of science. The journal has an impactfactor of 10.