OCTOBER 2020
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
Prof. Giuseppe Battaglia - University College London | The brain vasculature in health and disease: function and therapeutic opportunities. | |
Prof. Jan Grimm - Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, USA | IRON MAN Bad blood - treating cancer with an iron fist | |
Anirban Sen Gupta - Case Western Reserve University, USA | Taking a Bloody Path to Bioinspiration...and Academic Career Development
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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 |
|---|---|---|
Prof. Dan Peer - Tel Aviv University, Israel | RNA therapeutics using lipid nanoparticles: from gene silencing to gene editing | |
Prof. Tal Dvir - Tel Aviv University, Israel | Tissue engineering: From 3D printing to generation of bionic organs
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Dr. Craig L. Duvall - Vanderbilt University, USA | Precision Biologic Medicines for Vascular Transplant and Osteoarthritis
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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 |
|---|---|---|
Dr. Dmitry Fedosov - Helmholtz Institute Julich, Germany | Intricate journey of micro- and nano-carriers for drug delivery in the blood stream
| |
Prof. Olivia Merkel - Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, Germany | Pulmonary siRNA delivery: from T cell targeting to inhaled COVID nanomedicines | |
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.
March 2021
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
Lihi Adler-Abramovich - Tel Aviv University, Israel | Biomaterials for Tissue Regeneration | |
Marcelle Machluf - Technion, Israel | TBA | |
Zhen Gu - Zhejiang University, China | TBA | |
Paolo A. Netti - IIT/University of Naples, Italy | TBA | |
Zhuang Liu - Soochow University, China | TBA |
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.
