IBEC Seminar: Prof. Joo H. Kang and Prof. Jinmyoung Joo
Divendres, febrer 14 @ 11:00 am–12:00 pm
Microfluidic Approaches for Infection Treatment and Vascularized Tissue Regeneration
Joo H. Kang, Ph.D., Associate Professor Department of Biomedical Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology
Extracorporeal blood treatments for severe bacteremic sepsis have shown limited success, primarily due to the lack of effective strategies to remove various pathogenic materials from the bloodstreams. This presentation will focus on two of the most recent approaches addressing this challenge. The first utilizes red blood cell (RBC) membrane-coated superparamagnetic nanoclusters (RBC-SPNCs) that target a broad spectrum of bacteria and viruses in infected whole blood. In a swine sepsis model, these RBC-SPNCs demonstrated rapid capture and magnetic separation of various pathogens, even at high blood flow rates. Treatment of swine infected with multidrug-resistant E. coli significantly alleviated severe bacteremia-induced organ dysfunction within 12 hours, suggesting potential therapeutic utility in large animal models and possibly in human sepsis treatment. The second approach enables efficient bacterial removal by leveraging RBC deformability, which induces their axial migration and promotes bacterial margination, thereby enhancing capture efficiency within the microscale flow path of the extracorporeal device.
Toward the end of the presentation, we will discuss fully vascularized implants created using autologous blood plasma through a microfluidic device. Our results show that implanting theses vascularized scaffolds onto cutaneous wound sites significantly facilitated wound healing in a rodent model, resulting in increased collagen deposition, higher hair follicle numbers, and improved wound closure rates. The microvascular structures we implanted were anastomosed with the host’s blood vessels, enabling rapid deployment of neutrophils to the wound site and promoting the polarization of M2 macrophages, which further facilitated the wound healing process.
Engineering functional nanoparticles for translational and precision medicine
Jinmyoung Joo, Associate Professor Department of Biomedical Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology
Nanotechnology is of great importance to molecular biology and medicine because life processes are maintained by the action of a series of biological molecular nanomachines in the cell machinery. Recent advances in nanotechnology offer great potential applications in biomedical research and clinical diagnostics, and the development of a novel toolkit is critical to understand the inner world of complex biological nanosystems at cell, tissue and whole-body level. In particular, the unique combinations of material properties that can be achieved with nanomaterials provide new opportunities in biomedical applications, in which a number of functional nanomaterials have been investigated and become a new interdisciplinary frontier between biomedical science and materials engineering.
In this talk, self-destructing hybrid nanoparticles based on porous inorganic scaffolds and lipids will be discussed. The material allows a modular approach to the design of imaging or therapeutic agents, which includes features such as: intrinsic photoluminescence; singlet oxygen sensitization; capacity for a wide range of payloads such as magnetic nanoparticles, large proteins, or oligonucleotides; tunable degradation rates; and large external surface to provide multivalent targeting. Luminescent nanoparticles offer a non-toxic alternative to heavy metal-based quantum dots, and they have been shown to be biodegradable and to safely image tumors and organs in live animals. The addition of a targeting ligand that selectively interacts with tissues can improve the efficacy of imaging and drug delivery. These effects can be further enhanced if the nanoparticle contains more than one copy of the targeting ligand, enabling multivalent interactions with the targeted tissue. The use of the feasible functionality and biodegradable characteristics of the nanoparticles for in vitro and in vivo imaging and drug delivery systems will be highlighted.
