HP Innovation Journal Issue 09: Spring 2018 | Page 67

Viktor Shkolnikov Senior Research Scientist, 3D Print and Adjacencies Lab, HP Labs Viktor Shkolnikov leads a multidisciplinary team to develop novel microfluidic and electrokinetic technology for solving valuable diagnostics problems. This pioneering and fundamental research is investigating techniques for minimally invasive diagnosis of cancer, as well as developing tools to enable the next generation of biomedical research. What projects are you currently working on? My two main, current projects are rare cell isolation and cell transfection. For the rare cell isolation, we are devel- oping a technology to extract circulating tumor cells from patients’ blood to detect cancer by performing a liquid biopsy. That will provide clinicians more accurate infor- mation about the patient’s disease so that clinicians can make treatment decisions informed by high quality-data. With electrotransfection, we’re developing a technol- ogy to enable HP’s Digital Dispenser, from HP’s specialty printing systems, to place DNA, RNA, proteins, or other material into cells, using electric fields and precision flu- idic handling. This technology would make it easier for researchers to study fundamentals of molecular biology and make it easier to use exciting tools such as CRISPR/ Cas9 for targeted genome editing. What inspires you to innovate? I’m inspired to innovate when I see that I can solve a valu- able problem and help a large number of people. Problems involving human health are particularly interesting to me, as they often present a chance to dramatically reduce human suffering. What is your vision for the future? gather, and otherwise manipulate data, and turn it into actionable information. Our ability to manipulate information, and turn raw data into information is rapidly increasing, with tools like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and decreasing computational costs. Such burgeoning availability of infor- mation to both common man and professional alike will drastically improve our overall decision making in both personal and professional capacities. It will help us decide which restaurant to eat at, which service provider to use, and professionally, which therapy to prescribe to a patient, and therefore improve our overall quality of life. In the health care field, making decisions with more accurate data and more precise information will lead to better patient outcomes and reduce human suffering. Better data will lead to better information, better under- standing of diseases’ states, better treatments, earlier disease detection, and to better overall outcomes and qual- ity of life. This is why I’m excited to help bring healthcare into the information century. What does Keep Reinventing mean to you? Reinventing means disrupting the status quo and channel- ing the invention process toward valuable problems that can transform existing paradigms. I believe that this century is one of data and information. Enabled by the developments over the past decades, we’ve been given the unprecedented ability to sort, organize, 67