Priya Kaluskar is a PhD student at UWA Medical School. She hails from India and started her bioscience academic journey by enrolling in the BSc Hon Life Sciences program at Ahmedabad University, Gujarat, India. Later, she enrolled in a master’s of biotechnology at the University of Western Australia, specialising in molecular biology and biochemistry. During her research journey, she has had diverse research experiences and has come across scientific achievements through them. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD at UWA, focusing on the regeneration of peripheral nerves using electrical stimulations and topological cues. She is part of the ARC-centre of personalised therapeutics technologies node and ARC biomedical analysis ARC training centre.
Through her research endeavours, she gained a greater understanding of the capacity of biotechnology, gene therapy, and material science interventions to address and solve significant therapeutic limitations, especially in regenerative medicine. Such exposure in the fields of medicine, regeneration, biotechnology and translation biology developed her interest and inspired her to delve deeper into this field of research. She believes the biomedical analysis ARC training centre has provided great opportunities to hone her research skills. The centre has been a catalyst in advancing her knowledge, exposure, research capabilities, and research career. The centre’s exposure is not limited to the lab but offers an all-around development required to be a successful researcher.
In her PhD project, she aims to address the issue of incomplete recovery in peripheral nerve injury patients. Peripheral Nerve Injuries pose a significant challenge and have been a hotspot of research in regenerative medicine. However, the treatment outcomes are still unsatisfactory and result in partial or complete loss of sensory-motor function in the affected parts of the body. Although peripheral nerves have an innate ability to regenerate themselves, regeneration is a slow process with unsatisfactory outcomes. Hence external support is important. The current treatment uses hollow conduits to wrap around the injuries. However, these conduits are unable to accelerate or align the nerve regeneration at the cellular level. To address this limitation of nerve conduits, praya’s project endeavours to develop an electroconductive nerve guidance conduit to support electrical stimulation. This will aid in accelerating nerve growth. Secondly, to align the never regeneration at a cellular level, topological cues such as microgrooves will be introduced on the surface of the conduits to offer guidance on nerve gaps. As the final aim, her project aims to generate an electroconductive gradient on the circuit to study the behaviour of neuronal cells on electroconductive gradients.
Her objective through her PhD project is to address the limitation of peripheral nerve regeneration in longer nerve gaps. She aims to develop a nerve guidance conduit that can mimic epineurium (the outermost layer of the nerve)while being electrically conductive and topologically cued. This design will address both the limitations of the regeneration of peripheral nerves which are slow growth and unaligned regeneration. The learning and networking opportunities provided by the Biomedical Analysis ARC training centre will help her achieve her research goals and learn other possibilities for advancing her current studies. The centre has supported her research throughout her PhD by providing cutting-edge infrastructural support, mentoring support, collabooartion opportunities and research guidance.
Along with being a PhD candidate, Priya is also an entrepreneur. She is the technical director of a start-up called ASK Bioprocesses. Her company addresses the challenges of E-waste and air and water pollution due to energy-intensive metal extraction processes. The strat-up works on developing bioleaching processes to extract metals from industrial ore waste and E-waste in an environmentally friendly manner, resulting in high-quality metal extraction at a low cost to consumer and environmet.
