Beata Chertok
University of Michigan, USA
Title: Engineering active biomaterial platforms for targeted and image-monitored drug delivery
Biography
Biography: Beata Chertok
Abstract
Development of biomaterial-based carriers for drugs and genes is an exciting area of research at the interface of pharmaceutical sciences and biomedical engineering. Drug carriers are sought to encapsulate a drug cargo, protect it from elimination and degradation, and ferry it to the site of pathology, while minimizing potentially harmful detours to healthy organs. However, success in these tasks is at odds with the normal human physiology, which has evolved to eliminate harmful pathogens and xenobiotics. Although many “passive” drug carriers have been devised in an attempt to achieve targeted delivery of drugs and genes to diseased tissues, the mission of these carriers is often compromised by elimination mechanisms and multiple transport barriers obstructing their access to target cells. Our research focuses on development of “active” biomaterial drug platforms that combine sensitivity to external stimuli with visibility to medical imaging modalities. Such platforms can be externally activated on -demand to prevail over transport barriers at the site of pathology and non-invasively monitored to visualize arrival of carriers at the target site. In my talk, I will illustrate our strides in this domain through examples of magnetically- and acoustically-responsive and image-visible biomaterials we are currently developing. I will describe the process of implementing a biomaterial drug carrier with desired in vivo performance from an idea to material fabrication to proof-of-concept demonstration of functionality in animal models.