Category: students

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Penn Bioengineering Student Kaitlin Mrksich Wins Outstanding Research Award from the Society for Biomaterials

Kaitlin Mrksich, an undergraduate student in Penn Bioengineering, was honored with the Student Award for Outstanding Research (Undergraduate) by the Society for Biomaterials (SFB). This prestigious award recognizes undergraduate students who have shown outstanding achievement in biomaterials research.

Mrksich is a third-year student from Hinsdale, Illinois. She is interested in developing drug delivery systems that can serve as novel therapeutics for a variety of diseases. She works in the lab of Michael Mitchell, Associate Professor in Bioengineering. In the Mitchell Lab, Mrksich investigates the ionizable lipid component of lipid nanoparticles for mRNA delivery.

“In Kaitlin’s independent projects, she has focused on probing the role of lipophilicity and chirality for LNP-mediated mRNA delivery,” Mitchell said in the award announcement. “She has synthesized dozens of unique lipids, formulated these lipids into LNPs, and evaluated their potential for mRNA delivery in vivo and in primary T cells. She has been able to deduce structure-function relationships that help explain the role of lipid hydrophobicity in the delivery of mRNA by LNPs. Her findings have not only been instrumental in helping our lab design better LNPs but will also provide fundamental knowledge that will benefit all labs working on LNP technology.”

In addition to her academic activities, Mrksich is also the President of the Penn Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), where she plans community-building and professional-development events for bioengineering majors, and the visit coordinator for special programs for the Kite and Key Society, where she organizes virtual programming to introduce prospective students to Penn. She also tutors a West Philadelphia high school student in chemistry as part of the West Philadelphia Tutoring Project and is a member of Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society and Sigma Kappa sorority. After graduating, she plans to pursue an M.D.-Ph.D. in Bioengineering. 

Read the full list of 2024 SFB award recipients here.

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Lipid Nanoparticles That Deliver mRNA to T Cells Hold Promise for Autoimmune Diseases

by Janelle Weaver

Ajay Thatte, Benjamin Nachod, Rohan Palanki, Kelsey Swingle, Alex Hamilton, and Michael Mitchell (Left to Right – Courtesy of the Mitchell Lab) 

Autoimmune disorders are among the most prevalent chronic diseases across the globe, affecting approximately 5-7% of the world’s population. Emerging treatments for autoimmune disorders focus on “adoptive cell therapies,” or those using cells from a patient’s own body to achieve immunosuppression. These therapeutic cells are recognized by the patient’s body as ‘self,’ therefore limiting side effects, and are specifically engineered to localize the intended therapeutic effect.

In treating autoimmune diseases, current adoptive cell therapies have largely centered around the regulatory T cell (Treg), which is defined by the expression of the Forkhead box protein 3, orFoxp3. Although Tregs offer great potential, using them for therapeutic purposes remains a major challenge. In particular, current delivery methods result in inefficient engineering of T cells.

Tregs only compose approximately 5-10% of circulating peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Furthermore, Tregs lack more specific surface markers that differentiate them from other T cell populations. These hurdles make it difficult to harvest, purify and grow Tregs to therapeutically relevant numbers. Although there are additional tissue-resident Tregs in non-lymphoid organs such as in skeletal muscle and visceral adipose tissue, these Tregs are severely inaccessible and low in number.

Now, a research team led by Michael Mitchell, Associate Professor in Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has developed a lipid nanoparticle (LNP) platform to deliver Foxp3 messenger RNA (mRNA) to T cells for applications in autoimmunity. Their findings are published in the journal Nano Letters.

“The major challenges associated with ex vivo (outside the body) cell engineering are efficiency, toxicity, and scale-up: our mRNA lipid nanoparticles (mRNA LNPs) allow us to overcome all of these issues,” says Mitchell. “Our work’s novelty comes from three major components: first, the use of mRNA, which allows for the generation of transient immunosuppressive cells; second, the use of LNPs, which allow for effective delivery of mRNA and efficient cell engineering; and last, the ex vivo engineering of primary human T cells for autoimmune diseases, offering the most direct pipeline for clinical translation of this therapy from bench to bedside.”

“To our knowledge, this is one of the first mRNA LNP platforms that has been used to engineer T cells for autoimmune therapies,” he continues. “Broadly, this platform can be used to engineer adoptive cell therapies for specific autoimmune diseases and can potentially be used to create therapeutic avenues for allergies, organ transplantation and beyond.”

Delivering the Foxp3 protein to T cells has been difficult because proteins do not readily cross the cell membrane. “The mRNA encodes for Foxp3 protein, which is a transcription factor that makes the T cells immunosuppressive rather than active,” explains first author Ajay Thatte, a doctoral student in Bioengineering and NSF Fellow in the Mitchell Lab. “These engineered T cells can suppress effector T cell function, which is important as T cell hyperactivity is a common phenotype in autoimmune diseases.”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

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Leveraging the Body’s Postal System to Understand and Treat Disease

by Nathi Magubane

Microwell device with a solution in the reservoir (Image: Courtesy of David E. Reynolds)

Akin to the packages sent from one person to another via an elaborate postal system, cells send tiny parcels that bear contents and packaging material that serve key purposes: To protect the contents from the outside world and to make sure it gets to the right place via a label with an address. 

These packages are known as extracellular vesicles (EVs)—lipid-bound molecules that serve a variety of regulatory and maintenance functions throughout the body. They assist in the removal of unwanted materials within the cell, and they transport proteins, aid in DNA and RNA transfer, and promote tumorigeneses in cancerous cells. 

Given their myriad roles, EVs have taken center stage for many researchers in the biomedical space as they have the potential to improve current methods of disease detection and treatment. The main challenge, however, is accurately identifying the molecular contents of EVs while also characterizing the EVs, which, unlike other cellular components that are more homogenous, have more heterogeneity.

Now, a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania has developed a novel platform, droplet-free double digital assay, for not only profiling individual EVs but also accurately discerning their molecular contents. The researchers took the digital assay, which quantifies the contents of a molecule via binary metric—a 1 corresponds to the presence of a molecule and a zero to the lack thereof—and applies it to the EV. The work is published in Advanced Science.

The team was led by Jina Ko, an assistant professor with appointments in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and Perelman School of Medicine. “Our method allows for highly accurate quantification of the individual molecules inside an EV,” Ko says . “This opens up many doors in the realm of early disease detection and treatment.”

The researchers first compartmentalized individual EVs utilizing a microwell approach to isolate the EVs. Next, they captured individual molecules within the EVs and amplified the signal for clarity. The team then was able to determine the expression levels of pivotal EV biomarkers with remarkable precision via fluorescence.

Read the full story in Penn Today.

Jina Ko is an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine and an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

David Reynolds is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Bioengineering in Penn Engineering.

Other authors include, Menghan Pan, George Galanis, Yoon Ho Roh, Renee-Tyler T. Morales, Shailesh Senthil Kumar, and Su-Jin Heo of the Department of Bioengineering at Penn Engineering; Jingbo Yang and Xiaowei Xu of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Penn Medicine; and Wei Guo of the Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences at Penn.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health: grants R00CA256353, R35 GM141832, and CA174523 (SPORE).

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Estelle Sunghee Park Appointed Assistant Professor at Purdue University

Estelle Park, Ph.D.

Penn Bioengineering is proud to congratulate Sunghee Estelle Park, Ph.D. on her appointment as Assistant Professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University. Park earned her Ph.D. at Penn Bioengineering, graduating in July 2023. She conducted doctoral research in the BIOLines Lab of Dan Huh, Associate Professor in Bioengineering. Her appointment at Purdue will begin January 2024.

During her Ph.D. research, Park forged a unique path that combined principles in developmental biology, stem cell biology, organoids, and organ-on-a-chip technology to develop innovative in vitro models that can faithfully replicate the pathophysiology of various human diseases. Using a microengineered model of the human retina, she discovered previously unknown roles of the MAPK, IL-17, PI3K-AKT, and TGF-β signaling pathways in the pathogenesis of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), presenting novel therapeutic targets that could be further investigated for the development of AMD treatments. More recently, she tackled a significant challenge in the organoid field, the limited tissue growth and maturity in conventional organoid cultures, by designing microengineered systems that enabled organoids to grow with unprecedented levels of maturity and human-relevance. By integrating these platforms with bioinformatics and computational analyses, she identified novel disease-specific biomarkers of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and intestinal fibrosis, including previously unknown link between the presence of lncRNA and the development of IBD.

“The unique interdisciplinary expertise I gained from these projects has shaped me into a scholar with a strong collaborative ethos, a quality I hold in high esteem as we work towards advancing our knowledge and management of health and disease,” says Park.

Her vision as an independent researcher is to become a leading faculty who makes impactful contributions to our fundamental understanding of the factors influencing the structural and functional changes of human organs in health and disease. To achieve this, she plans to lead a stem cell bioengineering laboratory with a primary focus on tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. This will involve developing human organoids-on-a-chip systems and establishing next-generation biomedical devices and therapies tailored for regenerative and personalized medicine.

“I am grateful to all my Ph.D. mentors and lab mates at the BIOLines lab and especially my advisor Dr. Dan Huh, for his exceptional guidance, unwavering support, and invaluable mentorship throughout my Ph.D. journey,” says Park. “Dan’s expertise, dedication, and commitment to excellence have been instrumental in shaping both my research and professional development, while also training me to become an independent scientist and mentor.”

Congratulations to Dr. Park from everyone at Penn Bioengineering!

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Bioengineering Faculty Member Named ‘Young Innovator’ for Creation of Multiple Myeloma Therapy

by Abbey Porter

Michael Mitchell

Michael J. Mitchell, Associate Professor in Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been named a “Young Innovator of Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering” by Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, the journal of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES).

The award recognizes faculty who are conducting some of the most innovative and impactful studies in the field of biomedical engineering. Recipients will present their research and be officially recognized at the BMES Annual Meeting in October.

Mitchell is being honored for creating an RNA nanoparticle therapy that stops the spread of the deadly bone marrow cancer multiple myeloma and helps to eliminate it altogether. Known for being difficult to treat, the disease kills over 100,000 people every year.

“We urgently need innovative, effective therapies against this cancer,” Mitchell says. “The nanotechnology we developed can potentially serve as a platform to treat multiple myeloma and other bone marrow-based malignancies.”

Mitchell, along with Christian Figuerora-Espada, a doctoral student in Bioengineering, previously published a study in PNAS describing how their RNA nanoparticle therapy stops multiple myeloma from moving through the blood vessels and mutating. In their current paper in Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, which expands upon this RNA nanoparticle platform, they show that inhibition of both multiple myeloma migration and adhesion to bone marrow blood vessels, combined with an FDA-approved multiple myeloma therapeutic, extends survival in a mouse model of multiple myeloma.

Read more in Penn Engineering Today.

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Sonura Named Among 2023 PHL Inno Under 25 Honorees

Gabriella Daltoso, Sophie Ishiwari, Gabriela Cano, Caroline Amanda Magro, and Tifara Eliana Boyce

A team of recent Penn Bioengineering graduates have been included in list of prominent young Philadelphia innovators as chosen by The Philadelphia Business Journal and PHL Inno.

Gabriella Daltoso, Sophie Ishiwari, Gabriela Cano, Caroline Amanda Magro, and Tifara Eliana Boyce founded Sonura as their Senior Design Project in Bioengineering. The team, who all graduated in 2023, picked up a competitive President’s Innovation Prize for their beanie that promotes the cognitive and socioemotional development of newborns in the NICU by protecting them from the auditory hazards of their environments while fostering parental connection. Now, they have been included in the list of fourteen Inno Under 25 honorees for 2023.

“To determine this year’s list, the Philadelphia Business Journal and PHL Inno sought nominations from the public and considered candidates put forth by our editorial team. To be considered, nominees must be 25 years of age or younger and work for a company based in Greater Philadelphia and/or reside in the region.

Honorees span a wide range of industries, including consumer goods, biotechnology and environmental solutions. Many are products of the region’s colleges and universities, though some studied farther afield before setting up shop locally.”

Read “Announcing the 2023 PHL Inno Under 25 honorees” and “Inno Under 25” in PHL Inno. Penn affiliates can subscribe through Penn’s library services.

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The Physics of Fat Droplets Reveal DNA Danger

by Devorah Fischler

Fat is a normal and necessary part of the body. Fat cells store and release energy, as well as play significant roles in hormonal regulation and immunity.

Engineers and scientists at the University of Pennsylvania are the first to discover fat-filled lipid droplets’ (pictured above in green) surprising capability to indent and puncture the nucleus, the organelle which contains and regulates a cell’s DNA.

In recent decades, a concerning rise in metabolic illnesses – such as cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and diabetes – has focused scientific attention on the biology and chemistry of fat, resulting in a wealth of information about how fat cells work.

But fat cells and their metabolic activities are only part of the story.

Fat-filled lipid droplets, tiny spheres of fat many times smaller than fat cells, are a growing subject of scientific interest. Found inside many different cell types, these lipid particles have long been little understood. Studies have begun to illuminate these droplets’ participation in metabolic functions and cellular protection, but we still know next to nothing about the physical nature of fat.

Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science have looked beyond biochemistry to publish groundbreaking work on the physics of these droplets, revealing them to be a potential threat to a cell’s nucleus. In the August issue of the Journal of Cell Biology, they are the first to discover fat-filled lipid droplets’ surprising capability to indent and puncture the nucleus, the organelle which contains and regulates a cell’s DNA.

The stakes of their findings are high: a ruptured nucleus can lead to elevated DNA damage that is characteristic of many diseases, including cancer.

The study was led by Dennis E. Discher, Robert D. Bent Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Bioengineering, and in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Irena Ivanovska, Ph.D. research associate in Penn’s Molecular and Cell Biophysics Lab, and Michael Tobin, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Bioengineering.

“Intuitively, people think of fat as soft,” says Discher. “And on a cellular level it is. But at this small size of droplet— measuring just a few microns rather than the hundreds of microns of a mature fat cell—it stops being soft. Its shape has a much higher curvature, bending other objects very sharply. This changes its physics in the cell. It can deform. It can damage. It can rupture.”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

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SCALAR: A Microchip Designed to Transform the Production of mRNA Therapeutics and Vaccines

Led by Michael Mitchell and David Issadore of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, a team of researchers has developed a platform that could rapidly accelerate the development of mRNA-based lipid nanoparticle vaccines and therapeutics at both the small and large scale, SCALAR. (Image: iStock / Anatoly Morozov)

Following the global COVID-19 pandemic, the development and rapid deployment of mRNA vaccines highlighted the critical role of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) in the context of pharmaceuticals. Used as the essential delivery vehicles for fragile RNA-based therapies and vaccines, LNPs protect the RNA from degradation and ensure effective delivery within the body.

Despite their critical importance, the large-scale manufacturing of these LNPs saw numerous bottlenecks during the pandemic, underscoring the need for scalable production techniques that could keep pace with global demand.

Now, in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania describe how the Silicon Scalable Lipid Nanoparticle Generation platform (SCALAR), a reusable silicon- and glass-based platform designed to transform the production landscape of LNPs for RNA therapeutics and vaccines, offers a scalable and efficient solution to the challenges exposed during the COVID-19 crisis.

“We’re excited to create a piece of technology platform that bridges the gap between small-scale discovery and large-scale manufacturing in the realm of RNA lipid nanoparticle vaccines and therapeutics,” says co-author Michael Mitchell, associate professor of bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Penn. “By doing so, we’ve effectively leapfrogged the clunky, time-consuming, and costly barriers that slow down the production ramp-up of promising new RNA medicines and vaccines.”

The intricacies of RNA-based therapies require the RNA to be encased in a delivery system capable of navigating the body’s biological obstacles. LNPs fulfill this role, allowing the RNA to reach the intended cells for maximum therapeutic impact. SCALAR aims to take this a step further, allowing for an unprecedented three orders of magnitude scalability in LNP production rates, addressing the speed and consistency bottlenecks that hinder existing methods.

Sarah Shepherd, the first author of the paper and a recent Ph.D. graduate who worked in the Mitchell Lab, says, “With SCALAR, we’re not just reacting to today’s challenges but proactively preparing for tomorrow’s opportunities and crises. This technology is flexible, uses mixing architectures well-documented in microfluidics, and is scalable enough to meet future demands in real time. That’s an enormous leap forward for the field.”

Shepherd says that SCALAR builds on prior work from the Mitchell lab and is based on a microfluidic chip platform. Akin to a computer chip, wherein a computer’s electrically integrated circuit has numerous little transistors transporting signals as ones or zeroes to produce an output, the SCALAR microchip precisely controls their two key reagents, lipids and RNA, to generate LNPs.

Read the full story in Penn Today.

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Penn Bioengineers Recommend Improvements to Science Communication

Three graduate students in Bioengineering have collaborated to craft a list of recommendations to improve science communication during national health emergencies.

Doctoral students Miles J. Arnett, Dimitris Boufidis, and Melanie Hilman are part of the Penn Science Policy and Diplomacy Group (PSPDG), student organization which creates opportunities for students to get hands-on experience in Science Policy, Diplomacy, and Communication.

Their brief reviews the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic and recommends specific improvements to science policy and communication by national scientific institutions:

“The public health response to the pandemic was dramatically weakened by an uncoordinated communication strategy, inconsistent messaging, and fractured media environments. These shortcomings had a real human cost, with an estimated hundreds of thousands of Americans dying as a consequence of high rates of vaccine hesitancy. Now, in the aftermath of the pandemic, we have a chance to learn from this crisis and develop a more robust science communication infrastructure for future health emergencies.“

Read “From Chaos to Clarity: Reinventing Science Communication After COVID-19” at Medium.

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Student Spotlight: Cosette Tomita

Cosette TomitaCosette Tomita, a master’s student in Bioengineering, spoke with Penn Engineering Graduate Admissions about her research in cellular therapy and her path to Penn Engineering.

“What were you doing before you came to Penn Engineering? 

After college I wanted to get some industry experience before going to graduate school, so I spent a year working for a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey. I learned a lot—but mostly I learned that I wanted to go back into academia. So I was looking for a more research-oriented position to boost my graduate school applications, and I found a position at Penn’s cyclotron facility. Shortly after that, I applied to the master’s program. I’m still working at the cyclotron, so I’m doing the program part time. 

How has your experience in the program been so far? 

I love the research I’m doing here. I love the collaboration we have and the fact that I’m able to work with whoever I want to. And I can only say good things about my PI, Robert Mach. He’s a very busy man, but he makes time for his people. And he recognizes when somebody has a lot on their plate and he will go to bat for that person.

What’s your research all about? 

The focus of my PI’s lab is on neurodegenerative diseases and opiate use, so we’re looking to make imaging agents and antagonists that can help with the opioid crisis. 

For my project, I wanted to look at treating neurodegenerative disease from the perspective of cellular therapy. My PI doesn’t have that expertise, so when I came to him with this idea, he said I should talk to Mark Sellmyer in the bioengineering department. He does a lot of cellular therapies, cell engineering, protein engineering and things of that nature. So his lab is more biological. 

I don’t have a grant for my research, so my advisors are supporting it out of their own pockets. They could have said, no, you need to work on this project that’s already going on in the lab. But they gave me the intellectual freedom to do what I wanted to do.”

Read the full Q&A at the Penn Engineering Graduate Admissions website.

Mark Sellmeyer is Assistant Professor of Radiology in the Perelman School of Medicine and member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group.