Category: news

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Penn Bioengineering Graduate Shreya Parchure Receives Rose Award

Shreya Parchure (BSE/MSE 2021)

Shreya Parchure, a recent graduate of Penn Bioengineering, was selected by a committee of faculty for a 2021 Rose Award from the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF). The Rose Award recognizes outstanding undergraduate research projects completed by graduating seniors under the supervision of a Penn faculty member and carries with it a $1,000 award. Parchure’s project, titled “BDNF Gene Polymorphism Predicts Response to Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation (cTBS) in Chronic Stroke Patients,” was done under the supervision of Roy H. Hamilton, Associate Professor in Neurology and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and director of the Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation in the Perelman School of Medicine. Parchure’s work in Hamilton’s lab previously resulted in a 2020 Goldwater Scholarship.

Parchure graduated in Spring 2021 with a B.S.E. in Bioengineering, with concentrations in Neuroengineering and Medical Devices and a minor in Chemistry, as well as a M.S.E. in Bioengineering. During her time as an undergraduate, she was a Rachleff Scholar, a recipient of a Vagelos Undergraduate Research Grant, and the Wolf-Hallac Award. She was active in many groups across the university and beyond, serving as a United Nations Millennium Fellow, a volunteer with Service Link and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP), a CURF Research Peer Advisor, and co-editor-in-chief of the Penn Bioethics Journal. She is now pursuing a M.D./Ph.D. through the Medical Scientist Training Program at Penn Bioengineering and the Perelman School of Medicine.

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With a ‘Liquid Assembly Line,’ Penn Researchers Produce mRNA-Delivering-Nanoparticles a Hundred Times Faster than Standard Microfluidic Technologies

by Evan Lerner

Michael Mitchell, Sarah Shepherd and David Issadore pose with their new device.

The COVID vaccines currently being deployed were developed with unprecedented speed, but the mRNA technology at work in some of them is an equally impressive success story. Because any desired mRNA sequence can be synthesized in massive quantities, one of the biggest hurdles in a variety of mRNA therapies is the ability to package those sequences into the lipid nanoparticles that deliver them into cells.

Now, thanks to manufacturing technology developed by bioengineers and medical researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, a hundred-fold increase in current microfluidic production rates may soon be possible.

The researchers’ advance stems from their design of a proof-of-concept microfluidic device containing 128 mixing channels working in parallel. The channels mix a precise amount of lipid and mRNA, essentially crafting individual lipid nanoparticles on a miniaturized assembly line.

This increased speed may not be the only benefit; more precisely controlling the nanoparticles’ size could make treatments more effective. The researchers tested the lipid nanoparticles produced by their device in a mouse study, showing they could deliver therapeutic RNA sequences with four-to-five times greater activity than those made by conventional methods.

The study was led by Michael Mitchell, Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in Penn Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering, and David Issadore, Associate Professor in Penn Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering, along with Sarah Shepherd, a doctoral student in both of their labs. Rakan El-Mayta, a research engineer in Mitchell’s lab, and Sagar Yadavali, a postdoctoral researcher in Issadore’s lab, also contributed to the study.

They collaborated with several researchers at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine: postdoctoral researcher Mohamad-Gabriel Alameh, Lili Wang, Research Associate Professor of Medicine, James M. Wilson, Rose H. Weiss Orphan Disease Center Director’s Professor in the Department of Medicine, Claude Warzecha, a senior research investigator in Wilson’s lab, and Drew Weissman, Professor of Medicine and one of the original developers of the technology behind mRNA vaccines.

It was published in the journal Nano Letters.

“We believe that this microfluidic technology has the potential to not only play a key role in the formulation of current COVID vaccines,” says Mitchell, “but also to potentially address the immense need ahead of us as mRNA technology expands into additional classes of therapeutics.”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

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Penn Engineering’s Latest ‘Organ-On-a-Chip’ is a New Way to Study Cancer-related Muscle Wasting

by Melissa Pappas

Bioengineering’s Dan Huh and colleagues have developed a number of organ-on-a-chip devices to simulate how human cells grow and perform in their natural environments. Their latest is a muscle-on-a-chip, which carefully captures the directionality of muscle cells as they anchor themselves within the body. See the full infographic at the bottom of this story. (Illustration by Melissa Pappas).

Studying drug effects on human muscles just got easier thanks to a new “muscle-on-a-chip,” developed by a team of researchers from Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and Inha University in Incheon, Korea.

Muscle tissue is essential to almost all of the body’s organs, however, diseases such as cancer and diabetes can cause muscle tissue degradation or “wasting,” severely decreasing organ function and quality of life. Traditional drug testing for treatment and prevention of muscle wasting is limited through animal studies, which do not capture the complexity of the human physiology, and human clinical trials, which are too time consuming to help current patients.

An “organ-on-a-chip” approach can solve these problems. By growing real human cells within microfabricated devices, an organ-on-a-chip provides a way for scientists to study replicas of human organs outside of the body.

Using their new muscle-on-a-chip, the researchers can safely run muscle injury experiments on human tissue, test targeted cancer drugs and supplements, and determine the best preventative treatment for muscle wasting.

organ-on-a-chip
Dan Huh, Ph.D.

This research was published in Science Advances and was led by Dan Huh, Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering, and Mark Mondrinos, then a postdoctoral researcher in Huh’s lab and currently an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tulane University. Their co-authors included Cassidy Blundell and Jeongyun Seo, former Ph.D. students in the Huh lab, Alex Yi and Matthew Osborn, then research technicians in the Huh lab, and Vivek Shenoy, Eduardo D. Glandt President’s Distinguished Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Lab members Farid Alisafaei and Hossein Ahmadzadeh also contributed to the research. The team collaborated with Insu Lee and professors Sun Min Kim and Tae-Joon Jeon of Inha University.

In order to conduct meaningful drug testing with their devices, the research team needed to ensure that cultured structures within the muscle-on-a-chip were as close to the real human tissue as possible. Critically, they needed to capture muscle’s “anisotropic,” or directionally aligned, shape.

“In the human body, muscle cells adhere to specific anchor points due to their location next to ligament tissue, bones or other muscle tissue,” Huh says. “What’s interesting is that this physical constraint at the boundary of the tissue is what sculpts the shape of muscle. During embryonic development, muscle cells pull at these anchors and stretch in the spaces in between, similar to a tent being held up by its poles and anchored down by the stakes. As a result, the muscle tissue extends linearly and aligns between the anchoring points, acquiring its characteristic shape.”

The team mimicked this design using a microfabricated chip that enabled similar anchoring of human muscle cells, sculpting three-dimensional tissue constructs that resembled real human skeletal muscle.

The the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

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“’Electronic Nose’ Accurately Sniffs Out Hard-to-Detect Cancers”

A.T. Charlie Johnson, Ph.D.

A.T. Charlie Johnson, Rebecca W. Bushnell Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the Penn School of Arts & Sciences, and member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group has been working with a team of researchers on a new “electronic nose” that could help track the spread of COVID-19 based on the disease’s unique odor profile. Now, similar research shows that vapors emanating from blood samples can be tested to distinguish between benign and cancerous pancreatic and ovarian cells. Johnson presented the results at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting on June 4 (Abstract # 5544):

“It’s an early study but the results are very promising,” Johnson said. “The data shows we can identify these tumors at both advanced and the earliest stages, which is exciting. If developed appropriately for the clinical setting, this could potentially be a test that’s done on a standard blood draw that may be part of your annual physical.”

Read the full story in Penn Medicine News.

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Bioengineering Graduate Sofia Gonzalez Honored with Leadership Awards

Sofia Gonzalez (BSE & MSE 2021)

Sofia Gonzalez, who graduated with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Bioengineering this spring, was one of a select number of Penn students to receive 2021 Student Leadership Awards. Gonzalez was awarded a Penn Alumni Student Award of Merit as well as the William A. Levi Kite & Key Society Award for Service and Scholarship. Awardees were celebrated during the university’s annual Ivy Day, “a tradition recognizing students’ leadership, service, and scholarship for nearly 150 years.”

Gonzalez discussed the importance of diverse representation in the Student Leadership Awards Book:

“Sofia reflected that on countless college tours, she noticed a striking pattern: only one of the ambassadors she encountered was a female engineer, and none of them were Latinx. While the nation was reckoning with racism, Sofia was leading critical discussions about how Kite & Key could improve in areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion to mirror the Penn student body. Sofia is now graduating, confident that she took measurable strides toward breaking the cycle of underrepresentation at America’s first University. Sofia’s work leaves a lasting legacy at Penn and beyond.”

Gonzalez also served as a Senior Advisor to the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) and as President of the Kite and Key Society, a society which welcomes all visitors to campus, acquaints prospective students and families with the undergraduate experience, and fosters a community of students dedicated to serving the University of Pennsylvania. Having completed her degrees, Gonzalez is headed for the first year of a rotational program as a member of the Merck Manufacturing Leadership Development Program in Durham, NC.

Following her time at Merck, Gonzalez will continue her education at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Gaining admission to the M.B.A. program via the Early Admission offering, she will matriculate within the following five years.

Read the full list of 2021 award winners and learn more about the awards on the Ivy Day website.

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2021 CAREER Award recipient: Alex Hughes, Assistant Professor in Bioengineering

by Melissa Pappas

Alex Hughes (illustration by Melissa Pappas)

The National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award is given to early-career researchers in order to kickstart their careers in innovative and pivotal research while giving back to the community in the form of outreach and education. Alex Hughes, Assistant Professor in Bioengineering and in Cell and Developmental Biology, is among the Penn Engineering faculty members who have received the CAREER Award this year.

Hughes plans to use the funds to develop a human kidney model to better understand how the development of cells and tissues influences congenital diseases of the kidney and urinary tract.

The model, known as an “organoid,” is a lab-grown piece of human kidney tissue on the scale of millimeters to centimeters, grown from cultured human cells.

“We want to create a human organoid structure that has nephrons, the filters of the kidney, that are properly ‘plumbed’ or connected to the ureteric epithelium, the tubules that direct urine towards the bladder,” says Hughes. “To achieve that, we have to first understand how to guide the formation of the ureteric tubule networks, and then stimulate early nephrons to fuse with those networks. In the end, the structures will look like ‘kidney subunits’ that could potentially be injected and fused to existing kidneys.”

The field of bioengineering has touched on questions similar to those posed by Hughes, focusing on drug testing and disease treatment. Some of these questions can be answered with the “organ-on-a-chip” approach, while others need an even more realistic model of the organ. The fundamentals of kidney development and questions such as “how does the development of nephrons affect congenital kidney and urinary tract anomalies?” require an organoid in an environment as similar to the human body as possible.

“We decided to start with the kidney for a few reasons,” says Hughes. “First, because its development is a beautiful process; the tubule growth is similar to that of a tree, splitting into branches. It’s a complex yet understudied organ that hosts incredibly common developmental defects.

“Second,” he says, “the question of how things form and develop in the kidney has major medical implications, and we cannot answer that with the ‘organ-on-a-chip’ approach. We need to create a model that mimics the chemical and mechanical properties of the kidney to watch these tissues develop.”

The fundamental development of the kidney can also answer other questions related to efficiency and the evolution of this biological filtration system.

“We have the tendency to believe that systems in the human body are the most evolved and thus the most efficient, but that is not necessarily true,” says Hughes. “If we can better understand the development of a system, such as the kidney, then we may be able to make the system better.”

Hughes’ kidney research will lay the foundation for broader goals within regenerative medicine and organ transplantation.

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

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Strella Biotechnology Featured in Philly Mag

NextUp, a regular feature of Philadelphia Magazine that “highlights the local leaders, organizations and research shaping the Greater Philadelphia region’s life sciences ecosystem,” ran a profile of Philly-based agricultural startup Strella Biotechnology. Founded by Penn alumna Katherine Sizov (Bio 2019) and winner of a 2019 President’s Innovation Prize, Strella Biotech seeks to reduce food waste through innovative biosensors, and was initially developed in the George H. Stephenson Foundation Educational Laboratory, the biomakerspace and primary teaching lab of the Department of Bioengineering.

Sizov says the coronavirus pandemic has made the volatility of grocery stores’ offerings even more apparent. Last April, the Produce Marketing Association estimated that nearly $5 billion of fresh fruits and vegetables had gone to waste in the first month of the pandemic due to the complex supply chain’s inability to quickly redirect shipping and distribution. ‘In a way, I think COVID-19 has helped us realize how delicate and fragile supply chains are,’ she says. ‘We are working to create better, stronger supply chains that are economically and environmentally sustainable for everyone involved — researchers, growers, packagers, distributors, retailers, and consumers.'”

Read “NextUp: The Philly Startup Using Biosensors to Combat Food Waste and Improve Supply Chains” in Philly Mag.

Read more BE blog stories featuring Strella Biotechnology.

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Katherine Reuther Appointed Practice Associate Professor in Bioengineering

Katie Reuther, PhD, MBA

Katherine (Katie) Reuther, Ph.D., M.B.A. will return to Penn Engineering in July 2021 as the new Executive Director of Penn Health-Tech (PHT) and as Practice Associate Professor in Bioengineering. Reuther is an alumna of Penn Bioengineering, having obtained her Ph.D. at Penn in the laboratory of Louis Soslowsky, Fairhill Professor in Bioengineering and Orthopaedic Surgery.

“Dr. Reuther is a role model for biomedical innovation, linking formal training in engineering and entrepreneurship with deep practical experience in leading technologies through the commercialization pipeline. Dr. Reuther graduated with her Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering, Magna cum Laude, from the College of New Jersey; she obtained her Ph.D. in Bioengineering at Penn in the laboratory of Dr. Louis Soslowsky and completed her MBA at Columbia, where she currently is a Senior Lecturer in Design, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. During her tenure at Columbia, Dr. Reuther helped create and led Columbia’s Biomedical Engineering Technology Accelerator (BiomedX), overseeing more than 60 technologies leading to $80M in follow-on funding and 18 licenses to start-ups or start-ups industry.  Introducing both new courses and a new curriculum in biomedical innovation, Dr. Reuther was recently awarded Columbia’s highest teaching honor, the ‘2021 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching,’ this Spring as a recognition of her excellence in teaching and dedication to students.

Katie has extensive experience in developing and translating early-stage medical technologies and discoveries and providing formal educational training for aspiring medical entrepreneurs.  Dr. Reuther served as Director of Masters’ Studies for the Department of Biomedical Engineering and spearheaded the development of a graduate-level medical innovation program, including an interdisciplinary course available to scientists, engineers, and clinicians. Dr. Reuther provided advising and educational support to more than 100 student/faculty teams and start-ups, as they worked to develop and commercialize medical technologies. She will bring these extensive skills to PHT and Penn Bioengineering in two new, hands-on graduate courses in medical innovation centered around Penn Health-Tech ventures.”

Read the full announcement in OVPR news.

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Bioengineering Graduate Dayo Adetu Wins Graduate Leadership Award

Dayo Adetu (BSE 2019, MSE 2021)

Congratulations to recent Penn Bioengineering graduate Dayo Adetu, who was awarded a 2021 Graduate Leadership Award, one of only sixteen recipients across the university. Adetu is a recipient of the Dr. Andy Binns Award for Outstanding Service to Graduate and Professional Student Life. This award is presented to “graduate or professional students, upon their graduation from Penn, who have significantly impacted graduate and professional student life through service involvement in student life initiatives or organizations.” Adetu wins this award for her “service and leadership in advancing wellness and diversity initiatives across departments in the School of Engineering.”

Adetu graduated with a BSE in Bioengineering (BE) in 2019, concentrating in Biomedical Devices and minoring in Engineering Entrepreneurship, Math, and African Studies. She went on to pursue two Master’s degrees in BE and Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) (concentration: Design and Manufacturing), graduating with both in 2021. She also received a certificate in Integrated Product Design. For the 2020-2021 academic year, she served as President of the Penn chapters of both the Graduate Association of Bioengineers (GABE) and the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Association (MEGA). She was the 2021 MEAM MSE Graduation student speaker and also received the Penn Engineering Graduate Award for Outstanding Service for both BE and MEAM Departments.

Learn more about the Penn Graduate Leadership Awards and read the full list of recipients on the Grad Center at Penn website.

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César de la Fuente Featured in “40 Under 40” List

César de la Fuente, Ph.D.

César de la Fuente, PhD, Presidential Assistant Professor in Bioengineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Psychiatry, and Microbiology, was featured in the Philadelphia Business Journal’s Class of 2021 “40 Under 40” list. Currently focused on antibiotic discovery, creating tools for microbiome engineering, and low-cost diagnostics, de le Fuente pioneered the world’s first computer-designed antibiotic with efficacy in animal models.

De la Fuente was previously included in the AIChE’s “35 Under 35” list in 2020 and most recently published his work demonstrating a rapid COVID-19 diagnostic test which delivers highly accurate results within four minutes.

Read “40 Under 40: Philadelphia Business Journal’s complete Class of 2021” here.

Read other BE blog posts featuring Dr. de la Fuente here.