Science in Medicine Lecture: Ayokunle Olanrewaju, PhD

About this event

December 7, 2026

1 pm – 2 pm

Foege South Auditorium (Genome Sciences 060) & Streamed on Zoom Webinar

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“Rapid Enzyme Activity Tests for Monitoring Infectious Disease Treatment and Prevention”

For many infectious and chronic diseases, effective medications already exist, and prevention or treatment succeeds or fails on whether those drugs are dosed and taken correctly. Concentrations that are too low lead to new infection or treatment failure, and concentrations that are too high cause adverse reactions. Current methods for measuring drug concentrations are expensive, labor-intensive, and slow, which puts them out of reach for most people who would benefit from them. Rapid and inexpensive tests would make monitoring and dose individualization far more widely available, from centralized laboratories to the bedside and the home, and particularly in resource-limited settings.

Our lab develops tests that measure drug concentrations using the drugs’ own biochemical activity rather than by detecting the drug molecules themselves. I will begin with cytomegalovirus (CMV), where we measure ganciclovir triphosphate, the active form of the main CMV antiviral. Two groups need careful ganciclovir dosing. These are infants with congenital CMV and transplant recipients, in whom too little drug risks treatment failure and too much causes toxicity. I will then turn to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), where we have built user-friendly tests that measure the active intracellular forms of several HIV medications, with excellent concordance with gold-standard mass spectrometry. Next, I will describe how we flipped our assay principle on its head. Instead of using a recombinant enzyme to measure drug levels, we measure the activity of reverse transcriptase from the virus in patient samples. This gives phenotypic measurements of HIV viral load and drug resistance in the same rapid and user-friendly format.

I will close with potential extensions of this activity-based approach to tuberculosis and oncology, and with our current focus on optimizing, validating, and delivering these tests to populations in need both locally and globally.

Biography

Dr. Ayọ̀kúnlé Ọlánrewájú was born in Sagamu , Nigeria. He attended Mayflower School Ikenne where he developed a love for all things math and science. He moved to Fort St John , Canada in high school and attended North Peace Secondary School. Subsequently, he received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton , Canada. It was at the University of Alberta that he was first introduced to microfluidics & lab-on-a-chip devices with sci-fi inspired dreams of tricorder toolkits. He moved to Montréal to complete a PhD in Bioengineering focused on 3D-printing self-powered autonomous microfluidics for point-of-care diagnostic assays. To develop closer collaborations with clinicians and to connect with the people-driven essence of diagnostics development, he moved to the University of Washington (UW) for a postdoc focused on therapeutic monitoring of antiretroviral medications. He became an Acting Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department in June 2020 and started the Ọlánrewájú lab – jointly in the Bioengineering and Mechanical Engineering departments – in January 2022.

From Office of Research and Graduate Education