9/3 – Zongmin Zhao, University of Illinois Chicago
Biomedical Engineering Seminar
September 3, 2021
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
SEO 236
Address
851 S. Morgan St, Chicago, IL 60607, Chicago, IL 60612
Calendar
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Seminar: Zongmin Zhao, PhD
Title: Blood Cell-Inspired Strategies for Drug Delivery and Immunoengineering
Abstract: Delivering therapeutics to target sites while avoiding off-target accumulation is the key in designing therapies with desired efficacy and acceptable toxicity. To achieve this, a plethora of drug delivery systems including nanocarriers have been explored to improve the biological outcomes of respective drugs. However, majority of intravenously administered nanocarriers have so far failed to show desired accumulation in target sites, owing to key hurdles such as poor circulation and the inability to negotiate with significant biological barriers. Inspired by nature, intrinsic biology has provided several successful examples of “carriers” in the form of blood circulatory cells, which uniquely tackle hurdles faced by synthetic nanocarrier systems. Toward this end, we have explored blood cell-inspired Trojan Horse strategies (“cellular hitchhiking”) for directing therapeutics to their target sites. In this talk, I will discuss the principles of “cellular hitchhiking” for targeted drug delivery and discuss our recent efforts in leveraging this concept to address grand challenges in cancer therapy and immunoengineering.
Date posted
Aug 11, 2021
Date updated
Aug 13, 2021