Ashutosh Chilkoti

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Ashutosh Chilkoti is an Indian American biomedical engineer and a leading professor at Duke University, where he holds the Alan L. Kaganov Distinguished Professorship of Biomedical Engineering. He has authored more than 350 papers, been cited about 48,000 times, has an H-index around 116, and holds 62 U.S. patents.

His research focuses on designing protein-based materials and biointerfaces. He helped develop high‑throughput, scalable methods to make repetitive proteins called elastin-like polypeptides (ELPs), created a non-chromatographic way to purify proteins, and built injectable depots of ELPs for long-term drug release. His work also includes using ELPs to deliver cancer therapies and advancing point-of-care diagnostic technologies. He has explored phase-changing polypeptides that form programmable, cell-friendly condensates to control cellular processes.

Chilkoti has founded five startups: Sentilus (a clinical diagnostics company acquired by Immucor in 2014), PhaseBio Pharmaceuticals (a drug-delivery company that had an IPO on NASDAQ in 2018), Gateway Bio (founded in 2017), Isolere Bio (which uses ELPs to purify complex biologics and was acquired by Donaldson in 2023), and inSoma Bio (focused on injectable biomaterials for tissue reconstruction).

Beyond research and entrepreneurship, he helped start two Gordon Research Conferences on Biointerface Science and Bioinspired Materials, and he has led Duke’s Biomedical Engineering department as chair (2014–2022). He also launched BRiDGE, an incubator for BME startups, and the Duke Engineering Entrepreneurship Program (DEEP) for postdoctoral researchers.

Chilkoti is a fellow of several prestigious organizations, including the AAAS, the National Academy of Inventors, the Biomedical Engineering Society, the Controlled Release Society, the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering, and AIMBE. He earned his B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Delhi in 1985 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Washington in 1991, followed by postdoctoral work at UW. He joined Duke in 1996 and became a full professor in 2006.