Silicon Carbide Biotechnology

Dr. Stephen E. Saddow is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering, both departments in the College of Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF), Tampa. In 2020, he was appointed as a visiting researcher in the Molecular Imaging Branch, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD to facilitate the development of SiC-based nanoparticles to treat deep tissue cancer using near-infrared photoimmunotherapy (NIR-PIT). He is also a visiting scientist in the Elettra synchrotron light source in Trieste, Italy (BEAR beamline). He was elected Fellow of the AIMBE and is a senior member of both the IEEE and National Academy of Inventors. His group has demonstrated the compatibility of SiC and graphene to numerous cell lines in vitro and to the central nervous system of wild-type mice to cubic SiC (3C-SiC) in vivo. Studies include the MRI compatibility of 3C-SiC for neural probe applications as well as the ability to noninvasively detect changes in patient glucose levels without the need of needles that require frequent swap-out. The hemocompatibility of 3C-SiC has been established leading to the demonstration that 3C-SiC passed all phases of ISO-10993 testing, which is necessary to secure FDA approval for human clinical trials. He holds several patents relating to SiC biomedical devices, such as implantable glucose sensors and neural implants. He has more than 150 publications on SiC materials and devices and has edited two books on this topic: 'Silicon Carbide Biotechnology: A Biocompatible Semiconductor for Advanced Biomedical Devices and Applications' (Elsevier, 2012) and 'Silicon Carbide Biotechnology: A Biocompatible Semiconductor for Advanced Biomedical Devices and Applications, Second Edition' (Elsevier, 2016). His research interests include the development of advanced biomedical devices for human healthcare applications where he works at the nexus of material and biological science to engineer long-term, in vivo medical devices based on silicon carbide and its derivatives.