Presented at the biennial American Peptide Symposium, the Makineni Lectureship Award recognizes an individual who has made a recent contribution of unusual merit to research in the field of peptide science, and is intended to acknowledge original and singular discoveries.
Established in 2003 by an endowment by PolyPeptide Laboratories and Murray and Zelda Goodman, this lectureship honors Rao Makineni, a long-time supporter of peptide science, peptide scientists, and the American Peptide Society.
Election to the AIMBE College of Fellows is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to a medical and biological engineer, with AIMBE Fellows representing the top 2% of medical and biological engineers. College membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering and medicine research, practice, or education” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of medical and biological engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to bioengineering education.”
Nominated and reviewed by peers and members of the College of Fellows, de la Fuente was elected Fellow “for the development of novel antimicrobial peptides designed using principles from computation, engineering and biology.”
A formal ceremony will be held during the AIMBE Annual Event in Arlington, Virginia on March 27, 2023, where de la Fuente will be inducted along with 140 colleagues who make up the AIMBE College of Fellows Class of 2023.
AIMBE Fellows are among the most distinguished medical and biological engineers, including 3 Nobel Prize laureates and 17 Fellows having received the Presidential Medal of Science and/or Technology and Innovation, along with 205 having been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, 105 into the National Academy of Medicine and 43 into the National Academy of
Sciences.
The antimicrobial peptides the researchers studied are “encrypted” in that they are contained within Apolipoprotein B, a blood plasma protein that is not directly involved in the immune response, but are not normally expressed on their own.
The rise of drug-resistant bacteria infections is one of the world’s most severe global health issues, estimated to cause 10 million deaths annually by the year 2050. Some of the most virulent and antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens are the leading cause of life-threatening, hospital-acquired infections, particularly dangerous for immunocompromised and critically ill patients. Traditional and continual synthesis of antibiotics will simply not be able to keep up with bacteria evolution.
To avoid the continual process of synthesizing new antibiotics to target bacteria as they evolve, Penn Engineers have looked at a new, natural resource for antibiotic molecules.
César de la Fuente, Ph.D.
A recent study on the search for encrypted peptides with antimicrobial properties in the human proteome has located naturally occurring antibiotics within our own bodies. By using an algorithm to pinpoint specific sequences in our protein code, a team of Penn researchers along with collaborators, led by César de la Fuente, Presidential Assistant Professor in Psychiatry, Bioengineering, Microbiology, and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Marcelo Torres, a post doc in de la Fuente’s lab, were able to locate novel peptides, or amino acid chains, that when cleaved, indicated their potential to fend off harmful bacteria.
Now, in a new study published in ACS Nano, the team along with Angela Cesaro, the lead author and post doc in de la Fuente’s lab, have identified three distinct antimicrobial peptides derived from a protein in human plasma and demonstrate their abilities in mouse models. Angela Cesaro performed a great part of the activities during her PhD under the supervision of corresponding author, Professor Angela Arciello, from the University of Naples Federico II. The collaborative study also includes Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
“We identified the cardiovascular system as a hot spot for potential antimicrobials using an algorithmic approach,” says de la Fuente. “Then we looked closer at a specific protein in the plasma.”
