COVID-19 vaccines are just the beginning for mRNA-based therapies; enabling a patient’s body to make almost any given protein could revolutionize care for other viruses, like HIV, as well as various cancers and genetic disorders. However, because mRNA molecules are very fragile, they require extremely low temperatures for storage and transportation. The logistical challenges and expense of maintaining these temperatures must be overcome before mRNA therapies can become truly widespread.
With these challenges in mind, Penn Engineering researchers are developing a new manufacturing technique that would be able to produce mRNA sequences on demand and on-site, isolating them in a way that removes the need for cryogenic temperatures. With more labs able to make and store mRNA-based therapeutics on their own, the “cold chain” between manufacturer and patient can be made shorter, faster and less expensive.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is supporting this project, known as Distributed Ribonucleic Acid Manufacturing, or DReAM, through a four-year, $2 million grant from its Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) program.
The project will be led by Daeyeon Lee, Evan C Thompson Term Chair for Excellence in Teaching and Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE), along with Kathleen Stebe, Richer and Elizabeth Goodwin Professor in CBE and in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics. They will collaborate with Michael Mitchell, Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in the Department of Bioengineering, Drexel University’s Masoud Soroush and Michael Grady, the University of Oklahoma’s Dimitrios Papavassiliou and the University of Colorado Boulder’s Joel Kaar.
“I am so excited for Yogesh beginning his faculty career,” Raj says. “He is a wonderful scientist with a sense of aesthetics. His work is simultaneously significant and elegant, a powerful combination.”
With a unique background in engineering, developmental biology, biophysical modeling, and single-cell biology, Yogesh develops quantitative approaches to problems in developmental biology and cancer drug resistance. As a postdoc, Yogesh developed theoretical and experimental lineage tracing approaches to study how non-genetic fluctuations may arise within genetically identical cancer cells and how these fluctuations affect the outcomes upon exposure to targeted therapy drugs. The Goyal Lab at Northwestern will “combine novel experimental, computational, and theoretical frameworks to monitor, perturb, model, and ultimately control single-cell variabilities and emergent fate choices in development and disease, including cancer and developmental disorders.”
“I am excited to start a new chapter in my academic career at Northwestern University,” Goyal says. “I am grateful for my time at Penn Bioengineering, and I thank my mentor Arjun Raj and the rest of the lab members for making this time intellectually and personally stimulating.”
Congratulations to Dr. Goyal from everyone at Penn Bioengineering!
Penn Dental Medicine and Penn Engineering, which teamed earlier this year to launch the Center for Innovation and Precision Dentistry (CiPD), recently awarded the Center’s first IDEA (Innovation in Dental Medicine and Engineering to Advance Oral Health) Prize. Dr. Henry Daniell, W.B. Miller Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Basic & Translational Sciences at Penn Dental Medicine, and his collaborator, Dr. Daeyeon Lee, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Penn Engineering, are the inaugural recipients, awarded the Prize for a project titled “Engineered Chewing Gum for Debulking Biofilm and Oral SARS-CoV-2.”
“The IDEA Prize was created to support Penn Dental and Penn Engineering collaboration, and this project exemplifies the transformative potential of this interface to develop new solutions to treat oral diseases,” says Dr. Michel Koo, Professor in the Department of Orthodontics and Divisions of Pediatric Dentistry and Community Oral Health at Penn Dental Medicine and Co-Director of the CiPD.
“The prize is an exciting opportunity to unite Drs. Lee and Daniell and their vision to bring together state-of-the-art functional materials and drug-delivery platforms,” adds Dr. Kathleen Stebe, CiPD Co-Director and Goodwin Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Penn Engineering.
Open to faculty from Penn Dental Medicine and Penn Engineering, the IDEA Prize, to be awarded annually, supports collaborative teams investigating novel ideas using engineering approaches to kickstart competitive proposals for federal funding and/or private sector/industry for commercialization. Awardees are selected based on originality and novelty; the impact of the proposed innovation of oral/craniofacial health; and the team composition with complementary expertise. Indeed, the project of Drs. Daniell and Lee reflects all three.
The collaborative proposal combines Dr. Daniell’s novel plant-based drug development/delivery platform with Dr. Lee’s novel polymeric structures to create an affordable, long-lasting way to reduce dental biofilms (plaque) and oral SARS-CoV-2 transmission using a uniquely consumer-friendly delivery system — chewing gum.
“Oral diseases afflict 3.5 billion people worldwide, and many of these conditions are caused by microbes that accumulate on teeth, forming difficult to treat biofilms,” says Dr. Daniell. “In addition, saliva is a source of pathogenic microbes and aerosolized particles transmit disease, including COVID-19, so there is an urgent need to develop new methods to debulk pathogens in the saliva and decrease their aerosol transmission.”
University of Puerto Rico’s Edgardo Sánchez (left) and Penn graduate Zhiwei Liao working in the lab of Daeyeon Lee. Via the Advancing Device Innovation through Inclusive Research and Education program, researchers from Penn and the University of Puerto Rico will continue their materials science collaboration while supporting STEM career pathways for underrepresented groups. (Image credit: Felice Macera).
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded grants to eight research teams to support partnerships that will increase diversity in cutting-edge materials research, education, and career development. One of those teams is Penn’s Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM) and the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), whose long-running collaboration has now received an additional six years of support.
With the goal of supporting partnerships between minority-serving educational institutions and leading materials science research centers, NSF’s Partnership for Research & Education in Materials (PREM) program funds innovative research programs and provides institutional support to increase recruitment, retention, and graduation by underrepresented groups as well as providing underserved communities access to materials research and education.
‘Research at the frontier’
With this PREM award, known as the Advancing Device Innovation through Inclusive Research and Education (ADIIR) program, researchers from Penn and UPR’s Humacao and Cayey campuses will conduct research on the properties of novel carbon-based materials with unique properties, and will study the effects of surface modification in new classes of sensors, detectors, and purification devices.
Thanks to this collaboration of more than 20 years, both institutions have made significant scientific and educational progress aided by biannual symposia and regular pre-pandemic travel between both institutions before the pandemic, resulting in a rich portfolio of publications, conference presentations, patents, students trained, and outreach programs.
“Together we have been publishing good papers that have impact, and we’ve really cultivated a culture of collaboration and friendship between our institutions,” says Penn’s Arjun Yodh, former director of the LRSM. “Our goal is to carry out research at the frontier and, in the process, nurture promising students from Puerto Rico and Penn.”
Ivan Dmochowski, a chemistry professor at Penn who has been involved with PREM for several years, says that this program has helped his group connect with experts in Puerto Rico whose skills complement his group’s interests in protein engineering. Dmochowski has also hosted UPR faculty members and students in his lab and also travelled to Puerto Rico before the pandemic to participate in research symposia, seminars, and outreach events.
“I’ve had students who have benefitted from being a co-author on a paper or having a chance to mentor students, and the faculty we’ve interacted with are exceptional,” Dmochowski says. “There’s a lot of benefit for both me and my students, and I’ve enjoyed our interactions both personally and scientifically.”
Penn’s Daeyeon Lee, a chemical and biomolecular engineering professor who has been involved with PREM for several years, regularly hosts students and faculty from UPR while working on nanocarbon-based composite films for sensor applications. The success of this collaboration relies on unique materials made by researchers at UPR combined with a method for processing them into composite structures developed in Lee’s lab.
“What I really admire about people at PREM, both faculty and students, is their passion,” says Lee. “I think that’s had a really positive impact on my students and postdocs who got to interact with them because they got to see the passion that the students brought.”
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.
Created in the lab of César de la Fuente, this miniaturized, portable version of rapid COVID-19 test, which is compatible with smart devices, can detect SARS-CoV-2 within four minutes with nearly 100% accuracy. (Image: Courtesy of César de la Fuente)
César de la Fuente, Presidential Assistant Professor in Bioengineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Microbiology, and Psychiatry, was the inaugural recipient of the Nemirovsky Engineering and Medicine Opportunity (NEMO) Prize from Penn Health-Tech in 2020 for his low-cost, rapid COVID test. Now with promising results recently published in the journal Matter (showing 90 percent accuracy in as little as four minutes), Penn Health-Tech caught up with de la Fuente to discuss his experience over the past year:
“How did [your project] evolve in the past year?
‘We started with one prototype and now have three entirely different prototypes for the test. Two use electrochemistry, and we are now working on a new technology that uses calorimetry. With calorimetry, when the cotton swabs are exposed to the virus, they change color. This means users are able to see if they’re affected by a virus through a simple color change, making it more of a visual detection method.'”
RAPID, a low-cost COVID-19 diagnostic test, can detect SARS-CoV-2 within four minutes with 90 percent accuracy
Even as COVID-19 vaccinations are being rolled out, testing for active infections remains a critical tool in fighting the pandemic. Existing rapid tests that can directly detect the virus rely on reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), a common genetic assay that nevertheless requires trained technicians and lab space to conduct.
Alternative testing methods that can be scaled up and deployed in places where those are in short supply are therefore in high demand.
Penn researchers have now demonstrated such a method, which senses the virus by measuring the change in an electrical signal when a piece of the SARS-CoV-2 virus binds to a biosensor in their device, which they call RAPID 1.0.
The work, published in the journal Matter, was led by César de la Fuente, a Presidential Assistant Professor who has appointments in Engineering’s departments of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Bioengineering, as well as in Psychiatry and Microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine.
“Prior to the pandemic, our lab was working on diagnostics for bacterial infections. But then, COVID-19 hit. We felt a responsibility to use our expertise to help—and the diagnostic space was ripe for improvements,” de la Fuente said. “We feel strongly about the health inequities witnessed during the pandemic, with testing access and the vaccine rollout, for example. We believe inexpensive diagnostic tests like RAPID could help bridge some of those gaps.”
The RAPID technology uses electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), which transforms the binding event between the SARS-CoV-2 viral spike protein and its receptor in the human body, the protein ACE2 (which provides the entry point for the coronavirus to hook into and infect human cells), into an electrical signal that clinicians and technicians can detect. That signal allows the test to discriminate between infected and healthy human samples. The signal can be read through a desktop instrument or a smartphone.
A computer model of a mutated anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK), a known oncogenic driver in pediatric neuroblastoma.
Kinases are a class of enzymes that are responsible for transferring the main chemical energy source used by the body’s cells. As such, they play important roles in diverse cellular processes, including signaling, differentiation, proliferation and metabolism. But since they are so ubiquitous, mutated versions of kinases are frequently found in cancers. Many cancer treatments involve targeting these mutant kinases with specific inhibitors.
Understanding the exact genetic mutations that lead to these aberrant kinases can therefore be critical in predicting the progression of a given patient’s cancer and tailoring the appropriate response.
To achieve this understanding on a more fundamental level, a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and Perelman School of Medicine, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and researchers at the Yale School of Medicine’s Cancer Biology Institute, have constructed molecular simulations of a mutant kinase implicated in pediatric neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer impacting the central nervous system.
Using their computational model to study the relationship between single-point changes in the kinase’s underlying gene and the altered structure of the protein it ultimately produces, the researchers revealed useful commonalities in the mutations that result in tumor formation and growth. Their findings suggest that such computational approaches could outperform existing profiling methods for other cancers and lead to more personalized treatments.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was led by Ravi Radhakrishnan, Professor and chair of Penn Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering and professor in its Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Mark A. Lemmon, Professor of Pharmacology at Yale and co-director of Yale’s Cancer Biology Institute. The study’s first authors were Keshav Patil, a graduate student in Penn Engineering’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, along with Earl Joseph Jordan and Jin H. Park, then members of the Graduate Group in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. Krishna Suresh, an undergraduate student in Radhakrishnan’s lab, Courtney M. Smith, a graduate student in Lemmon’s lab, and Abigail A. Lemmon, an undergraduate in Lemmon’s lab, contributed to the study. They collaborated with Yaël P. Mossé, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Penn Medicine and in the division of oncology at CHOP.
“Some cancers rely on the aberrant activation of a single gene product for tumor initiation and progression,” says Radhakrishnan. “This unique mutational signature may hold the key to understanding which patients suffer from aggressive forms of the disease or for whom a given therapeutic drug may yield short- or long-term benefits. Yet, outside of a few commonly occurring ‘hotspot’ mutations, experimental studies of clinically observed mutations are not commonly pursued.”
Ravi Radhakrishnan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Bioengineering and Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is among the many faculty who quickly adapted their courses to an online format in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, a recent publication in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Journal reflects one of these revamped courses. The course BE 559: “Multiscale Modeling of Chemical and Biological Systems” provides theoretical, conceptual, and hands-on modeling experience on three different length and time scales: (1) electronic structure (A, ps); (2) molecular mechanics (100A, ns); and (3) deterministic and stochastic approaches for microscale systems (um, sec). During the course, students gained hands-on experience in running codes on real applications together with the following theoretical formalisms: molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo, free energy methods, deterministic and stochastic modeling. The transition to the online format was greatly facilitated by a grant from the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) which provided cloud and supercomputing resources to the students facilitating the computational laboratory experience. Radhakrishnan’s article, “A survey of multiscale modeling: Foundations, historical milestones, current status, and future prospects,” reviews the foundations, historical developments, and current paradigms in multiscale modeling (MSM).
Radhakrishnan aspires to modernize computational science, integrating Multiscale Modeling and Data Science for Biological and Biomedical Science & Engineering. His team does so by integrating multiphysics modeling, computing, data science to tackle applications. The integrative approach is pictorially depicted here in terms of modeling different length and timescales using techniques such as molecular dynamics of atomistic systems, Brownian dynamics of coarse-grained systems, and field equations governing continuum scales of macroscopic systems.
The first lecture in the Fall 2020 Penn Bioengineering Seminar Series will be held Thursday, September 10th. All seminars this semester will be held virtually on Zoom.
Quinton Smith, PhD
Speaker: Quinton Smith, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Thursday, September 10, 2020
Time: 3:00-4:00 pm
Zoom – check email for link or contact ksas@seas.upenn.edu
Title: “Stem Cell Fate is a Touchy Subject”
Abstract:
The success of regenerative cell therapy relies on the integration of a functional vascular system within the redeveloping tissue, to mediate the exchange of oxygen, nutrients and waste. Although the advent of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) has accelerated progress towards this goal, owing to their potential to generate clinically relevant scales of patient-specific cells, techniques to drive their specification mainly rely on chemical cues. In this seminar, I will discuss engineering strategies to control the complex stem cell extracellular milieu, emphasizing the importance of mechanical cues during hiPSC development, specification and downstream functionality as it relates to vascular differentiation.
Bio:
Quinton Smith received his PhD in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2017 after completing his bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of New Mexico. As a graduate student under the guidance of Dr. Sharon Gerecht, Quinton implemented various engineering tools to explore the roles of physical and chemical cues on stem cell lineage specification and downstream maturation. Dr. Smith is currently a postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, where he is investigating the role biliary epithelium in liver regeneration. Dr. Smith’s predoctoral work was supported by an NIH/NHLBI F-31 and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He is a recipient of the 2017 Siebel Scholar award, and most recently joined the class of 2018 HHMI Hanna Gray Fellows.
See the full list of upcoming Penn Bioengineering fall seminars here.
