Onur Parlak

Onur Parlak

Assistant Professor
Visiting address: CMM, L8:02, Karoliska Universitetssjukhuset Solna, 17176 Stockholm
Postal address: K2 Medicin, Solna, K2 Derm o Ven Xu Landén N Parlak O, 171 77 Stockholm

About me

  • Onur Parlak earned his PhD in Bioelectronics from Linköping University in 2015. He then received a Fellowship from The Knut and Alice Wallenberg
    Foundation (KAW) and started postdoctoral research at Stanford University, focusing on wearable bioelectronics. After spending three years, he returned to Sweden and joined the Karolinska Institutet to translate his engineering skills into medical settings with a KAW starting grant. In 2021, he was awarded by KI Central Funding as an Assistant Professor as part of the KI investment program to recruit and support leading junior researchers with particularly outstanding scientific merits and future potential. Since 2021, Dr. Parlak has been 
    acting as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Medicine, Solna, Dermatology and Venereology Unit in Karolinska Institutet, where he
    specializes in personalized diagnostics and wearable bioelectronics.


Articles

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Grants

  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2023 - 31 December 2026
    One-fifth of Sweden’s population is affected by slow-healing wounds, and the number is rapidly growing. In Sweden, 2.5 billion SEK is spent on treating chronic wounds annually. Notably, the 5-year mortality rate for patients who suffer from chronic wounds is even higher than prostate and breast cancer. However, effective and targeted wound treatment using advanced tools and devices is still lacking due to a poor understanding of the pathogenic mechanisms and inadequate real-time information on a wound. Therefore, we believe a better understanding of the wound provided by in situ physiological surveillance on bacterial load can help for timely diagnosis and identify novel therapeutic targets. Existing methods for bacterial sensing require an extensive procedure and, more importantly, cannot provide real-time information. These tests usually take long hours, resulting in suboptimal antibiotic therapy that negatively affects commensal microflora and increases antimicrobial resistance. Here, we propose to design a wearable epidermal patch for multiplexed sensing of whole bacterial cells and bacterial biomarkers for the fast and early diagnosis of bacterial infection in a human skin wound. This project aims to combine cutting-edge interdisciplinary methodologies with our unique access to patient materials, which creates an unprecedented opportunity to address fundamental questions in infection monitoring in human wounds.

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