Past Webinars 2020 -2021
Wednesday Webinars
Kindly sponsored by
OCTOBER 2020
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
October 7 | Prof. Giuseppe Battaglia - University College London | The brain vasculature in health and disease: function and therapeutic opportunities. |
October 14 | Prof. Jan Grimm - Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, USA | IRON MAN Bad blood - treating cancer with an iron fist |
October 21 | Anirban Sen Gupta - Case Western Reserve University, USA | Taking a Bloody Path to Bioinspiration...and Academic Career Development
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October 28 | Yevgeny Brudno - University of North Carolina, USA | Noninvasively Refilling Drug-Eluting Depots
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Prof. Giuseppe Battaglia
Bio: Beppe Battaglia is the Chair of Molecular Bionics at the Department of Chemistry and Institute of Physics of Living System at University College London and since 2019 he’s also an ICREA professor and senior group leader at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia at the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology.
Beppe graduated in 2001 in Chemical Engineering from the University of Palermo and got a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Sheffield in 2006. He got his first independent position in 2006 at the University of Sheffield where he held position as lecturer (assistant professor) from 2006 to 2009 in the Kroto Institute in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; senior lecturer (associate professor) from 2009 to 2011; and professor and Chair of Synthetic Biology from 2011 to 2013 in the Krebs Institute in the Department of Biomedical Science.
Dr. Anirban Sen Gupta
Dr. Anirban Sen Gupta is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio, with secondary appointments in Pharmacology and Pathology at Case School of Medicine. Dr. Sen Gupta did a double major in Chemistry (HONORS) and Chemical Engineering (B. Tech.) for his undergraduate training at University of Calcutta (Kolkata), India and did his Masters and PhD in Chemical Engineering at The University of Akron, Ohio, USA, graduating in 2003. After completing post-doctoral training in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western during 2003-2006 with Prof. Jim Anderson and Prof. Roger Marchant, Dr. Sen Gupta joined as a tenure-track faculty in Fall 2006 and was subsequently tenured with promotion to Full Professor in 2017. The research in Sen Gupta laboratory focuses on Bio-inspired Engineering for Advanced Therapeutics, utilizing knowledge and tools from physiological and pathological mechanisms, biomolecular and biomaterials design, nanotechnology and drug delivery. Current projects in Sen Gupta laboratory include: (1) Bioartificial blood surrogates, (2) Thrombosis and Thromboinflammation targeted nanomedicine, (3) Mechanistic elucidation of platelet and neutrophil signaling in cancer, and (4) Point-of-care diagnostics in hemostasis, thrombosis and coagulopathy areas. Specific technologies from Sen Gupta laboratory have also been translated through Haima Therapeutics, a biotechnology start-up that Dr. Sen Gupta co-founded in 2016. The ongoing research endeavors at Sen Gupta laboratory are supported by funding from NSF, NIH and DoD.
Prof. Jan Grimm
Jan Grimm is an Attending and Full member (Professor) in Radiology and Member of the Molecular Pharmacology Program in MSKCC. He is also a Professor of Pharmacology in Weil Cornell Medical College. His Lab focuses on the development of novel imaging and therapy approaches for cancer. His lab was the first to utilize PET tracers clinically for Cerenkov imaging and is developing new approaches for this novel modality. He strives to develop novel concepts on how to image biological events, understanding the biological basis while simultaneously keeping clinical translatability within sight. This drive led to the discovery of an unknown yet important oncogenic role of PSMA in prostate cancer. The lab recently developed a novel therapeutic approach with nanoparticles, oxidative ferrotherapy, utilizing clinical approved iron oxide nanoparticles for leukemia therapy.
As an expert in the field of imaging and board certified nuclear medicine physician and radiologist with experience in both clinical radiology and basic science, Dr. Grimm received his medical degree from the University of Hamburg and his PhD from the University of Schleswig-Holstein, both in Germany. He was a postdoctoral fellow and later faculty in the Center for Molecular Imaging research at MGH in Boston from 2002-2006 and joined MSKCC in 2006, where he became a full Professor In 2019. He authored numerous articles, is NIH funded and received several awards for his work. He is also an elected member of the American Scoiety for Clinical Investigation and Associate Editor for the Journal of Nuclear Medicine .
Yevgeny Brudno
Yevgeny received his Bachelor’s degrees in Chemistry and Biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University. His postdoctoral work with David Mooney centered on the first technology allowing for non-invasive replenishment of drug- and growth factor-releasing hydrogels and surfaces. This widely applicable method allows for repeated, local and controlled release of therapeutic factors in a wide range of diseases, with wide applicability in drug and cell delivery and regenerative medicine. In 2017, Yevgeny joined the Biomedical Engineering Department at UNC - Chapel Hill and NC State - Raleigh . Research in the Brudno lab focuses on exploiting cutting-edge chemical, biomaterial and nanomedicine technologies to understand physiological responses during disease and regeneration and fulfill critical unmet needs in the clinic. Our group uses chemical prodrug therapy, controlled drug delivery and nanomedicine to enable new forms of cancer chemotherapy and immunotherapy as well as treatment of infection and other diseases.
NOVEMBER 2020
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
November 4 | Prof. Dan Peer - Tel Aviv University, Israel | RNA therapeutics using lipid nanoparticles: from gene silencing to gene editing |
November 11 | Prof. Tal Dvir - Tel Aviv University, Israel | Tissue engineering: From 3D printing to generation of bionic organs
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November 18 | Dr. Craig L. Duvall - Vanderbilt University, USA | Precision Biologic Medicines for Vascular Transplant and Osteoarthritis
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November 25 | Prof. Michael King - Vanderbilt University, USA | Nanoparticles to target and prevent cancer metastasis
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Prof. Dan Peer
Prof. Dan Peer is a Full Professor and the Director of the Laboratory of Precision NanoMedicine at Tel Aviv University (TAU). From Oct. 2020 he is the Vice President for Research & Development at Tel Aviv University. From 2016-2020, he was the Chair of Tel Aviv University Cancer Biology Research Center; the biggest Cancer Center in Israel that includes 17 affiliated hospitals and from 2017 he is the Founding and Managing Director of SPARK Tel Aviv, Center for Translational Medicine at TAU.
Prof. Peer’s work was among the first to demonstrate systemic delivery of RNA molecules using targeted nanocarriers to the immune system and he pioneered the use of RNA interference (RNAi) as drug discovery tools in immune cells. In addition, his lab was the first to show systemic, cell specific delivery of modified mRNA to cells to induce therapeutic gene expression of desired proteins. This has enormous applications in cancer, inflammation and infection diseases. In addition, he pioneered the use of targeted lipid nanoparticles as carriers for molecular medicines (gene silencing, gene expression and gene editing).
Prof. Peer has more than 120 pending and granted patents. Some of them have been licensed to several pharmaceutical companies and one is currently under registration. In addition, based on his work, five spin-off companies were generated aiming to bring innovative personalized molecular medicines into clinical practice using precision nanotechnology.
Prof. Peer is a scientific advisory board member in more than 15 companies and on the scientific advisory board of 20 journals. He is a past President of the Israeli Chapter of the Controlled Release Society, and a Past Member of the Board of the Israel Young Academy.
Prof. Tal Dvir
Tal Dvir is a Professor at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He obtained his B.Sc. (2003) and Ph.D (2008) degrees from the faculty of Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. His Ph.D research focused on cardiac tissue engineering and regeneration. Tal continued his postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of Prof. Robert Langer in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. His postdoc research focused on advanced materials for tissue engineering and regeneration. In October 2011 Tal was recruited by the Department of Biotechnology and the Center for Nanotechnology at Tel Aviv University to establish the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine. In 2013, Tal also joined the newly established Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Tel Aviv.
Currently, Tal’s laboratory designs and develops smart bio and nanomaterials and technologies for engineering complex tissues, such as the heart, brain, spinal cord, intestine, eyes and more. During his career Tal has published many high impact papers and received numerous prizes and awards. Tal is also an inventor of numerous patents.
Prof. Michael R. King
Michael R. King is the J. Lawrence Wilson Professor and Department Chair of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. Previously he was the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor at Cornell University. He completed a PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Notre Dame and postdoctoral training in bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written textbooks on the subjects of statistical methods and microchannel flows, and has received several awards including the NSF CAREER Award, Outstanding Research Awards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Society of Clinical Chemistry, and was a James D. Watson Investigator of New York State. King is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical the Biological Engineering and the Biomedical Engineering Society and the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering, and served as Vice President of the International Society of Bionic Engineering. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, an official journal of the Biomedical Engineering Society, and serves as the Chairt of the Biomedical Engineering Council of Chairs.
Dr. Craig L. Duvall
Biosketch: Dr. Craig L. Duvall is Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. He completed his Ph.D. in BME at Georgia Tech and Emory University in 2007 under the guidance of Robert Guldberg, Ph.D. and W. Robert Taylor, M.D., Ph.D. His postdoc was completed in Bioengineering in the labs of Patrick Stayton and Allan Hoffman at the University of Washington through support from an NIH NRSA-funded postdoctoral fellowship. Based on these foundations, the Duvall Advanced Therapeutics Laboratory (ATL) was launched in the Vanderbilt Biomedical Engineering Department in 2010, and Dr. Duvall was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016, Professor in 2019, and Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor in 2019. Dr. Duvall has won awards such as the PECASE, NSF CAREER Award, Society for Biomaterials Young Investigator Award, Controlled Release Society Gene Delivery and Gene Editing Focus Group Young Investigator Award, Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Young Innovator Award, AIMBE Fellow, BMES Fellow, and standing membership on the Gene and Drug Delivery NIH Study Section. The ATL is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, and National Science Foundation.
Research Summary: The Duvall Advanced Therapeutics Laboratory (ATL) specializes in design and application of smart polymer-based technologies for: (1) intracellular delivery of biological drugs such as peptides and nucleic acids, (2) proximity-activated targeting of drugs to sites of inflammation and matrix remodeling, (3) long-term, “on-demand” drug release from localized depots. The ATL also has a budding interest in molecular design and chemistry of RNA therapeutics. Technologies developed in the ATL are tuned for improving the therapeutic index of existing drugs and/or to serve as enabling technologies for manipulation of intracellular targets currently considered to be “undruggable”. Our works is applied to a variety of disease applications including wound healing, osteoarthritis, breast cancer, and vascular transplant.
DECEMBER 2020
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
December 2 | Dr. Dmitry Fedosov - Helmholtz Institute Julich, Germany | Intricate journey of micro- and nano-carriers for drug delivery in the blood stream
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December 9 | Prof. Olivia Merkel - Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, Germany | Pulmonary siRNA delivery: from T cell targeting to inhaled COVID nanomedicines |
December 16 | Dr. María J. Vicent - Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe, Spain | Polypeptide-based conjugates in Regenerative Medicine |
Dr. Dmitry Fedosov
Dmitry Fedosov received his Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, Russia in 2002. After earning a MS degree in aerospace engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2004, he moved to Brown University, where he pursued a PhD degree in applied mathematics. Dmitry received a MS degree in applied mathematics in 2007 and his PhD in 2010. His thesis work was on multiscale modeling of blood flow and soft matter with the focus on modeling polymers and blood cells. His thesis work was recognized with the David Gottlieb Memorial Award for excellence in graduate study by the Brown University’s Division of Applied Mathematics and with the 2011 Nicholas Metropolis Award for outstanding doctoral thesis work in computational physics from the American Physical Society. After completing his PhD, Dmitry moved to Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany for a postdoctoral position in the theoretical soft matter and biophysics group led by Gerhard Gompper. In 2012, Dmitry was awarded the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Humboldt foundation to build up an independent research group at the Institute of Complex Systems, Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany. In 2016, he obtained a Habilitation in Theoretical Physics from the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Cologne, Germany. Dmitry continues to work as a research group leader at the Institute of Biological Information Processing and Institute for Advanced Simulation, Forschungszentrum Juelich with a research focus on non-equilibrium physics, including various complex systems in biophysics, and soft and active matter.
Prof. Olivia Merkel
Olivia Merkel has been a Professor of Drug Delivery in the Department of Pharmacy at LMU Munich in Germany since 2015. From 2011 until 2017 she was an Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutics and an Associate Faculty Member of Oncology at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA, where she is also a Scientific Member of the Molecular Therapeutics Program and Faculty in the Cancer Biology Graduate Program at Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, MI. She became a Registered Pharmacist in 2005. In 2006, she received a MS in Pharmaceutical Technology from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, and a PhD in Pharmaceutical Technology from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, in 2009. She received several awards, including the PHOENIX Pharmacy Award, APV Research Award, Princess-Therese of Bavaria Award, an ERC Starting Grant, the Galenus Foundation Technology Award, the Young Investigator Award from the College of Pharmacy at Wayne State, the Young Pharmaceutical Investigator Award granted by the European Federation for Pharmaceutical Science, an invitation to the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting, the Carl-Wilhelm-Scheele-Award by the German Pharmaceutical Society (DPhG) and the award for the best PhD thesis at Philipps-Universität Marburg. Prof. Merkel is the author of over 70 peer-reviewed articles, 13 book chapters and the editor of two books. She served as NIH reviewer from 2014-2015, is a standing international member of the Swiss National Science Foundation review board, Editorial Board member for the Journal of Controlled Release, the European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics, Molecular Pharmaceutics, Advanced NanoBiomed Research, Pharmaceutics, Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B, and an honorary member of the Académie des Alpilles. Since 2020, she has been the President of the Controlled Release Society German Local Chapter as well as the Chair of the CRS Focus Group Transdermal and Mucosal Delivery. From 2015 until 2017, Prof. Merkel headed research labs both in Detroit and Munich. Currently her research centers around targeted siRNA delivery in cancer, inflammatory diseases and viral infections with a focus on pulmonary administration and is funded by the European Research Council, several foundations, and AbbVie.
Dr. María J. Vicent
Dr. María J. Vicent received her Ph.D. degree in 2001 in chemistry after her research on solid supports from the Universitat Jaume I (Castellon, Spain) after several scientific stays in the laboratory of Prof. Fréchet’s lab. at the University California (Berkeley, USA). María then moved into more biomedically-oriented research, initially with the Spanish company Instituto Biomar S.A., and subsequently at the Centre for Polymer Therapeutics at the University of Cardiff (UK) with Prof. R. Duncan after receiving a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2002. In 2004, María joined the Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe (CIPF, Valencia, Spain) as a research associate through a Marie Curie Reintegration contract and was promoted to her current position as the head of the Polymer Therapeutics Laboratory at CIPF in 2006. María is currently responsible for the Screening Platform one of the Specialist Sites in the EU-OPENSCREEN European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) and coordinates the Advanced Therapies Program at the CIPF.
María’s research group focuses on the development of novel nanopharmaceuticals for different therapeutic and diagnostic applications - in particular the application of Polymer Therapeutics in unmet clinical needs. María has been funded by both national and European grants (several acting as coordinator, including an ERC Consolidator grant-MyNano and ERC-PoC-POLYIMMUNE, Fund Health La Caixa-NanoPanTher) from academia as well as industry. María has received several prizes, including the IVth and the IXth Idea Awards, and she has been elected as member of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows Class of 2019. María has co-authored 120 peer-reviewed papers and ten patents. Three patents have been licensed to the pharmaceutical industry, one being used for co-founding the spin-off company ‘Polypeptide Therapeutic Solutions S.L.’ (Valencia, Spain) in 2012. María was the President of the SPLC-CRS up to 2013 and the chairperson in key conferences in the nanomedicine field, such as the International Symposium on Polymer Therapeutics and the annual Controlled Release Society meeting in 2019 in Valencia. María is also the executive editor of Adv. Drug Deliv Rev, the associate editor of DDTR, and a member of the editorial boards of key journal in the field including, J. Control Rel., Polymer Chemistry, Biomaterial Sciences, or Mol. Pharmaceutics.
JANUARY 2021
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
* January 13 | Horacio Cabral - University of Tokyo, Japan | Overcoming Tumoral Barriers for Enhanced Nanomedicine Targeting
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January 20 | Netanel Korin - Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Israel | The Mechanics of Cardiovascular Nanomedicines |
January 27 | Avi Schreoder - Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Israel | The tumor type and patient sex affect nanomedicine efficacy |
Horacio Cabral
Horacio Cabral is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from The University of Tokyo in 2007 under the supervision of Prof. Kazunori Kataoka. Dr. Cabral was an Assistant Professor at the Center for Disease Biology and Integrative Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, until 2010, when he joined the Department of Bioengineering of The University of Tokyo as a Lecturer. In 2014, he was promoted to his current position. Dr. Cabral has published more than 100 articles and his h-index is 44. His major research interests relate to the development of nanomedicines for diagnosis and therapy, particularly systems directed to intractable cancers.
Netanel Korin
Netanel Korin is an Assistant Professor at the faculty of Biomedical Engineering at The Techion - Israel Institute of Technology and the head of the Cardiovascular NanoMed Engineering lab. Prior to joining the Technion, Dr. Korin was a Wyss Technology Development Fellow and a Research Associate at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, a Master’s and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Technion. Netanel has authored papers leading journals including Science, Nano letters, Lab on a Chip, Physical Review Letters, Journal of Biomechanics and other major research journals. His work has been highlighted in other leading journals including Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Drug Discovery Reviews and New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Korin’s research group focuses on engineering aspects of vascular biology with emphasis on the interplay between hemodynamics, vascular physiology, and transport phenomena in vascular diseases. The long-term objective of the group’s research is to allow better understanding of the biophysical determinants of vascular disease and to leverage this knowledge to develop innovative therapeutic and diagnostic approaches.
Avi Schroeder
Avi Schroeder is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology where he heads the Laboratory for Targeted Drug Delivery and Personalized Medicine Technologies (https://www.schroederlab.com/ ).
Dr. Schroeder conducted his Postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his PhD jointly at the Hebrew and Ben Gurion Universities.
Avi is the recipient of more than 30 national and international awards, including named a KAVLI Fellow, the Intel Nanotechnology-, TEVA Pharmaceuticals-, and the Wolf Foundation Krill Awards. Avi is the author of more than 50 research papers inventor of 19 patents and co-founder of several startup companies based on these discoveries.
Schroeder is a member of Israel Young National Academy of Sciences, and the President of the Israel Institute of Chemical Engineers.
FEBRUARY 2021
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
February 3 | Prof. Lola Eniola-Adefeso - University of Michigan | Tuning Vascular-Targeted Carriers for Immune Interactions: Implication for Disease Treatment |
February 10 | Prof. Felipe Prosper Cardoso - University of Navara, Spain | An epigenetic approach for the understanding and treatment of cancer |
February 17 | Moein Moghimi - Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK | Phage-mimetic self-assemblies for effective biotherapeutic delivery to the brain |
February 24 | Samir Mitragotri - Harvard University, USA | Cellular Hitchhiking for Targeted Drug Delivery |
Prof. Felipe Prosper Cardoso
Professor Prosper graduated from the University of Navarra in 1989 and after his residency and PhD he completed his fellowship as postdoctoral training at the University of Minnesota. Relocated to the Clinica Universidad de Navarra in 2001, he was responsible for the development the cell therapy program where he became head and became the Head of Hematology and Cell Therapy in 2003 and Director of the programs of Hematology and Cell Therapy at the center for Applied Medical Research at the University of Navarra in 2012.
Felipe’s principal research interest and key discoveries have been focused on several specific areas:
- Understanding epigenetic changes present in patients with hematological malignancies, mainly multiple myeloma and leukemia-MDS;
- Identification of new epigenetic targets and design of new molecules;
- Stem cell biology and stem cell therapy for human diseases
- Clinical trials in patients with multiple myeloma and leukemia-MDS.
Professor Prosper has published more than 240 peer review articles in top journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Genetics, Blood, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Leukemia, Genome Research or Oncogene among others with an H-factor of 52 and over 9000 citations and has given more than 300 lectures. His laboratory is funded through national and international grants including competitive programs such as IMF, European Union (FP6, FP7 and H2020), Spanish Ministry of Health and Ministry of Science and has obtained more than 50 grants. He has received multiple awards and prizes and has mentored over 30 PhD students and postdocs during his career.
Samir Mitragotri
Samir Mitragotri is the Hiller Professor of Bioengineering and Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. His research has provided new insights into biological barriers of skin, blood-brain barrier, immune clearance and gastrointestinal tract, among others. His research has also led to new methods of transdermal, oral, and targeted drug delivery systems. He is an author of over 300 publications and is a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher. Prof Mitragotri is an inventor on over 180 patent/patent applications. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Inventors. He is a foreign member of Indian National Academy of Engineering. He is also an elected fellow of AAAS, CRS, BMES, AIMBE, and AAPS. He received BS in Chemical Engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, India and PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the Editor-in-Chief of AIChE’s and SBE’s journal Bioengineering and Translational Medicine.
Moein Moghimi - Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Professor of Nanomedicine and Pharmaceutics, School of Pharmacy, Newcastle University, UK | Professor, Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Newcastle University, UK | Adjoint Professor, University of Colorado Medical Centre, CO, USA | Associate Editor - Molecular Therapy (Cell Press)
Editor-in-Chief - Journal of Nanotheranostics (Basel)
Research interests: Advanced drug delivery systems; Nanomedicine; Nanosafety; Immunobiology
Prof. Lola Eniola-Adefeso - University of Michigan
Dr. Lola Eniola-Adefeso is the University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Macromolecular Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Dr. Eniola-Adefeso joined the faculty of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan in 2006, where she runs the Cell Adhesion and Drug Delivery Laboratory. Since her arrival at Michigan, Dr. Eniola-Adefeso has received several honors and awards, including the NSF CAREER, Lloyd Ferguson Young Investigator Award, American Heart Association Innovator Award, and BMES MIDCAREER Award. She is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and BMES, and serves as Deputy Editor for Science Advances. Her research is currently funded by multiple grants from the NIH National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, American Heart Association and the National Science Foundation.
March 2021
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
March 3 | Lihi Adler-Abramovich - Tel Aviv University, Israel | Biomaterials for Tissue Regeneration |
March 10 | Marcelle Machluf - Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Israel | NanoGhost a new drug delivery paradigm |
* March 17 | Zhen Gu - Zhejiang University, China | Bioresponsive drug delivery |
March 24 | Paolo A. Netti - IIT/University of Naples, Italy | Multi-functional Layer-by-Layer Polymeric nanosome as bioactive agent vehicles |
March 31 | Zhuang Liu - Soochow University, China | Biomaterials to Boost Cancer Immunotherapy |
Lihi Adler-Abramovich
Lihi Adler-Abramovich is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Dental Medicine, where she is a principal investigator and the head of the Laboratory of Bioinspired Materials and Nanotechnology. Dr. Adler-Abramovich studied biology at Tel Aviv University where she received both her M.Sc. (summa cum laude) and her Ph.D. (2010). She was awarded numerous prestigious grants and prizes, including the ERC Starting Grant, ISF-Center for Excellence Grant and the Colton Foundation Scholarship. Lihi is the author of over 80 publications including publications in Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Communications, Nano Letters, ACS Nano and she is the inventor of more than 10 patents.
The study in Laboratory of Bioinspired Materials and Nanotechnology is focused on mimicking self-assembly processes that occur in nature, including biomineralization processes and the organization of short peptides and amino acids into ordered nanostructures. This multidisciplinary group, including chemist, biologist, physicians and engineers, is interested in supramolecular self-assembly, and uses biophysical tools to study molecular interaction, combining in vitro and in vivo studies. Based on the understanding of the molecular interaction and the formation of ordered nanostructure the group utilize the resulting assembly product architectures for various biological and medical applications, including the design and synthesis of 3D hydrogels scaffold for tissue engineering, combining short self-assembling peptide and natural polysaccharides such as hyaluronic acid and alginate. The group develop new materials for 3D printing to form personalized scaffolds, as well as controlled drugs release vehicle and antimicrobial moieties.
Paolo Antonio Netti
Paolo A. Netti obtained a degree in Chemical Engineering in 1990 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 1994 at the University of Naples "Federico II". He subsequently carried out research at the IRC in the Biomedical Materials of the University of London and at the Health Science and Technology Institute of Harvard University in Boston. Since 2000 he has been teaching and conducting research at the University of Naples "Federico II" where he is now a full professor of bioengineering. His scientific interests are in the field of biomaterials for health care, for tissue regeneration and tissue engineering, for nanomedicine in therapy and diagnostics and for advanced sensors. He is known in the international scientific community for having contributed to enriching and expanding the modern concept of biomaterial and extending the boundaries of the application to ever wider sectors of biomedical areas. He has been co-founder and director of the Interdepartmental Center for Research on Biomaterials (CRIB) of Federico II University (2004 – 2010); Chair of the Master's Degree in Materials Engineering from 2005 to 2013; Founder and chair the Master's Degree in Industrial Bioengineering since 2015; Founder and director of the Center for Advanced Biomaterials for Health Care (IIT @ CRIB) of the Italian Institute of Technology since 2009; Member of the scientific panels of the European commission for the definition of the roadmap for the development of new platforms on biomaterials (VII framework program); since 2009 he has been a member of the advanced grants evaluation committee of the European Research Council (ERC) and from 2015 to 2018 he has been the Chair of the PE5 panel of the Advanced Grants; he has been scientific tutor for some MIUR research platforms (FIRB 2012); the promoter of a program to create a national network of tissue engineering laboratories (FIRB-TISSUENET), and component of the panel of experts for the preparation of the Italian Research Program (PNR) 2020-2026. He has published over 450 scientific papers accumulating over 15,000 citations, over 30 book chapters, and has filed over 30 patents.
Zhen Gu
Dr. Zhen Gu is a Qiushi Distinguished Professor and Dean of College of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Zhejiang University. He received B.S. degree in Chemistry and M.S. degree in Polymer Chemistry and Physics from Nanjing University. In 2010, he obtained Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was a Postdoctoral Associate working with Dr. Robert Langer at MIT and Harvard Medical School. Before he moved to Zhejiang University in 2020, he was a Full Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Director of the NIH Biotechnology Training in Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Program. From 2012 to 2018, he was working in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, where he was appointed as a Jackson Family Distinguished Professor. He has published over 200 research papers and applied over 100 patents. He is the recipient of the Young Investigator Award of Controlled Release Society (2017), Sloan Research Fellowship (2016) and Pathway Award of the American Diabetes Association (2015). MIT Technology Review listed him in 2015 as one of the top innovators under the age of 35. He was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 2019.
Marcelle Machluf
Marcelle Machluf is full professor and -dean of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering at the Technion Haifa Israel. Marcelle Machluf holed a PhD degree from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering the unit of Biotechnology, Ben Gurion University Bear Sheva, in Liposomes and polymer delivery for vaccines development. Prof Machluf had a post-doctoral fellowship of five years experience in drug delivery, gene therapy and tissue engineering in Harvard Medical School, Boston MA, US. Professor Machluf laboratory focuses in the drug delivery area, based on a novel delivery system that is based on cell membrane of stem cells and is termed Nanoghosts. Another area of research is tissue engineering, developing scaffolds for that are focused on natural isolated extracellular matrix (ECM), and which are modulated to allow injectable, microcapsule or other 3D platforms formation. Prof Machluf has an Adjunct Professor position in the prestigious School of Material Science Engineering (NTU, Singapore) Singapore. Her group, which consists of 15 PhD students, 3 postdoc and 2-research assistances. Professor Machluf has published more than 90 papers (among which Nature Biotec, Nano Letters, Cancer Research, J of Controlled Release) and chapters in books. She has 8 patents in national phase and 4 international approved ones in the field of drug delivery and tissue engineering. Prof Machluf is on the editorial board of several journals among which are Scientific Report and Tissue Engineering and part of the Minerva Programe Committee, under the Max-Planck Institute (Germany). She is currently the President of the Israeli controlled release society. Her work in drug delivery was selected by the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology as one of Israel’s sixty most impactful scientists for developments in the field of advanced cancer therapies. She was also chosen to light the torch for the 70th independent year of the state of Israel. Lady Globes Magazine selected her as the Women of the Year (2018). In November 2019 Prof Machluf has founded a startup company” NanoGhost” for the therapy of Cancer and raised 5M$ to support the scale-up process of the platform until reaching Phase 1 clinical studies.
Zhuang Liu
Dr. Zhuang Liu is a professor at Soochow University in China. He received his BS degree from Peking University in 2004 and PhD degree from Stanford University in 2008. In 2009, Dr. Liu joined Institute Functional Nano & Soft Materials (FUNSOM) at Soochow University. Dr. Liu is now working in the field of biomaterials and nanomedicine, to develop smart materials and nanotechnology for biomedical imaging and cancer therapy. Dr. Liu has authored over 300 peer-reviewed papers, with a total citation of > 60,000 times and an H-index at 130. He has been listed as one of ‘Highly Cited Researchers’ (Materials, Chemistry) by Thomson Reuters since 2015. He has been invited to be the Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2015, and elected to be the Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 2019. The awards he received include the Periodic Table of Younger Chemists by IUPAC, Biomaterials Science Lectureship by RSC, National Distinguished Young Scholar Award (Fund) by NSFC, etc. Now he is serving as an associate editor for Biomaterials.
April 2021
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
April 7 | Bruno Sarmento - i3S, University of Porto, Portugal | Two of versatile sides of functionalized PLGA-based nanomedicines: Targeted delivery of biopharmaceuticals in diabetes and cancer |
April 21 | Prof Hélder Santos - University of Helsinki, Finland | Dressing Biohybrid Nanomaterials in Cell’s Clothing For Chemo-immunotherapy Applications |
April 28 | Stefaan De Smedt - Ghent University, Belgium | Delivery of Bio-Therapeutics: Struggling with biological barriers & more |
Bruno Sarmento
Prof. Bruno Sarmento is Principal Investigator, member of the Board of Directors and Group Leader of the Nanomedicines and Translational Drug Delivery group at the Institute for Investigation and Innovation in Health (i3S), University of Porto, Portugal and Professor at Instituto Universitário de Ciências da Saúde (IUCS).
He graduated in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Porto (PT) in 2002 and completed a PhD in Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology at UP in 2007, in collaboration with Queen’s University (CA), University of Copenhagen (DK) and University of Santiago de Compostela (ES). From 2007 to 2012 he held a Post-Doc position at UP, in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen. In 2008 he was appointed Assistant Professor at IUCS. He is Visiting Professor of the Post-Graduate School, UniOeste (BR) and Visiting Research Professor at Queen’s University, Belfast (UK).
So far, he has supervised/co-supervised 14 Post-Docs (11 completed), 40 PhD students (28 completed) and 36 MSc students (35 completed), and 13 researcher assistants. He attracted direct competitive funding worth more than 10 M€, at national and international levels.
His current research is focused on the development of functionalized nanomedicines and materials and their application in the pharmaceutical and biomedical fields. In particular, he is interested in the establishment of nanoformulations of advanced functional biomaterials and understand their interaction with cells and biological surfaces, with interest in cancer, diabetes and infectious diseases. He has also specialized in mucosal tissue engineering models to validate functionalized nanomedicines and to perform in vitro/in vivo correlation.
He published more than 370 papers in international journals (H index 53), 54 book chapters and edited 5 books in the field of nanomedicine, biomaterials and biological barriers.
Bruno Sarmento was the Chair of the Nanomedicines and Nanoscale Drug Delivery Focus Group of the Controlled Release Society and is member of the Board of the Spanish-Portugal Local Chapter of the Controlled Release Society. He is editor of European Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Journal of Controlled Release, Pharmaceutics and Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery.
Hélder A. Santos
Prof. Santos (D.Sc. Tech., Chem. Eng.) is a Full Professor in Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology, Head of the Nanomedicines and Biomedical Engineering Group, and Director of the Doctoral Program in Drug Research at the Faculty of Pharmacy, at the University of Helsinki. He is also a Fellow Member of Helsinki Institute of Life Science (HiLIFE), the Director of the FinPharmaNet (The Network of Drug Research Doctoral Programmes in Finland), Chair of Controlled Release Society Focus Group in Nanomedicine and Nanoscale Delivery, and Chairman and co-founder of Capsamedix Oy. Prof. Santos research interests include the development of nanoparticles/nanomedicines for biomedical applications. Prof. Santos is co-author of more than 350 publications (+10600 citations; h-index = 61), and more than 260 conference proceedings/abstracts. He has given over 175 invited talks at prestigious conferences, universities and schools around the world. Prof. Santos has received a number of prestigious awards and grants, such as the "Talent Prize in Science" attributed by the Portuguese Government in 2010, the European Research Council Starting Grant in 2013 and ERC Proof-of-Concept in 2018, the Young Researcher Award in 2013 attributed by the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Helsinki, the Academy of Finland Award for Social Impact in 2016, and is currently the coordinator of H2020 MSCA-ITN-EJD network (2021-2024).
Stefaan De Smedt
Stefaan De Smedt studied pharmacy. He joined the Janssen Research Foundation and became Professor at Ghent University in 1999. He served as dean of his Faculty (2010-2014) and is a member of the Board of Directors of Ghent University. He has been a Guest Professor at 5 universities in Belgium and China. Since 2004 he serves as the European Editor of the JCR, currently as Deputy Editor-in-Chief. His research is at the interface between drug delivery, biophysics and material sciences. He is the (co-)author of > 350 manuscripts (h-factor: 72; > 20 000 citations) including contributions to Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Nature biotechnology, Nature Drug Discovery Reviews. He has been the (co-) promoter of 50 doctoral theses; 8 of his fellows are professors at various faculties, 4 of them received most prestigious Grants from the ERC. He filed 20 patents and is a scientific founder of Memobead Technologies. He is as member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine and the Académie Nationale de Pharmacie of France.