Bioengineering Graduate Student Hannah Zlotnick Named Schmidt Science Fellow

by Evan Lerner

Hannah Zlotnick

Hannah Zlotnick, a graduate student in the Department of Bioengineering and a member of the McKay Orthopaedic Research Laboratory in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, has been named a Schmidt Science Fellow.

She joins 28 early-career scientists from around the world in this year’s cohort, with each receiving support for one to two years, $100,000 in salary support per year, individualized mentoring, and a series of professional development sessions as they pivot to the next stages of their research agendas.

The fellowship is a program of Schmidt Futures, the philanthropic initiative of Eric and Wendy Schmidt that aims to tackle society’s toughest challenges by supporting interdisciplinary researchers at the start of their careers.

“Our latest group of Schmidt Science Fellows embodies our vision for this Program at its inception five years ago,” says Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Futures and former CEO and Chairman of Google. “We find the most talented next-generation leaders from around the world and back these impressive young adults with the resources and networks they need to realize their full potential while addressing some of the big scientific questions facing the world. Congratulations to the 2022 Schmidt Science Fellows, I am excited to see where your science takes you and what you will achieve.”

Working at the intersection of materials science, biology, and applied clinical research, Zlotnick’s postdoctoral work will involve developing advanced bioprinting techniques for regenerative medicine. Such advances are necessary to recreate the multi-cellular composition of orthopedic tissues, such as those found in the knee joint. Lab-grown tissue models can then be used to broaden our understanding of how degenerative diseases progress after injury, limit the need for animal models, and serve as a platform for therapeutic discovery.

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

Bioengineering Student Savan Patel Receives the 2022 C. William Hall Scholarship

Savan Patel

Savan Patel, a junior studying Bioengineering and Finance in the Jerome Fisher Management and Technology dual degree program, was selected as the recipient of the 2022 C. William Hall Scholarship from the Society for Biomaterials. The C. William Hall Scholarship is named in honor of the Society for Biomaterials’ first president and is awarded annually “to a junior or senior undergraduate pursuing a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering or a related discipline focusing on biomaterials.” As this year’s recipient, Savan will receive complimentary membership to the Society and will have expenses paid to the Society’s annual meeting being held April 27-30, 2022 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Savan is currently a member of the lab of Michael J. Mitchell, Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in Bioengineering. Savan’s research interests lie in the interface of drug delivery and immunoengineering with a particular focus on T cell delivery. His current project involves the use of modified cholesterol molecules to improve the delivery of nucleic acids (i.e., mRNA) to cell populations using lipid nanoparticles.

Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) are a clinically proven delivery platform for nucleic acid therapeutics. One drawback of these particles is their high cellular recycling rate. Savan and the members of the Mitchell lab are working to reduce this recycling by leveraging cellular processes and incorporating modified molecules into our lipid nanoparticle formulations. The focus of Savan’s project is on modifying cholesterol, a molecule that is important to both our LNP formulations and cell membranes. The goal is to generate a more potent delivery platform to improve current therapeutics.

Following graduation, Savan intends to pursue a Ph.D. in Bioengineering.

Michael Mitchell Receives the 2022 SFB Young Investigator Award

by Ebonee Johnson

Michael Mitchell, Ph.D.

Michael Mitchell, Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in the Department of Bioengineering, has been awarded the 2022 Society for Biomaterials (SFB) Young Investigator Award for his “outstanding achievements in the field of biomaterials research.”

The Society for Biomaterials is a multidisciplinary society of academic, healthcare, governmental and business professionals dedicated to promoting advancements in all aspects of biomaterial science, education and professional standards to enhance human health and quality of life.

Mitchell, whose research lies at the interface of biomaterials science, drug delivery, and cellular and molecular bioengineering to fundamentally understand and therapeutically target biological barriers, is specifically being recognized for his development of the first nanoparticle RNAi therapy to treat multiple myeloma, an incurable hematologic cancer that colonizes in bone marrow.

“Before this, no one in the drug delivery field has developed an effective gene delivery system to target bone marrow,” said United States National Medal of Science recipient Robert S. Langer in Mitchell’s award citation. “Mike is a standout young investigator and leader that intimately understands the importance of research and collaboration at the interface of nanotechnology and medicine.”

Academic recipients of the SFB Young Investigator Award should not exceed the rank of Assistant Professor and must not be tenured at the time of nomination. The award includes a $1,000 endowment.

This story originally appeared in Penn Engineering Today.

Daniel A. Hammer Named Director of Center for Precision Engineering for Health

Daniel Hammer
Daniel Hammer, Ph.D.

by Evan Lerner

Earlier this year, Penn President Amy Gutmann and Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, announced a $100 million commitment to accelerate innovations in medical technologies. Called the Center for Precision Engineering for Health (CPE4H), the initiative aims to bring together researchers from a wide range of fields to develop customizable biomaterials and implantable devices that can be tailored for individualized diagnostics, treatments and therapies.

Now, Daniel A. Hammer, Alfred G. and Meta A. Ennis Professor in Penn Engineering’s Departments of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been named CPE4H’s inaugural director.

“Penn is a unique environment where innovations in healthcare can emerge very rapidly, as we’ve seen with the development of CAR-T cancer immunotherapy, and the design and delivery of mRNA vaccines,” Hammer says. “Engineering plays a central role in making those technologies functional and maximizing their impact, and CPE4H is a golden opportunity to take these technologies to the next level in a way that actually helps people.”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

BE Seminar: “Ionic Liquid-based Therapeutics” (Samir Mitragotri)

Samir Mitragotri, Ph.D.

Speaker: Samir Mitragotri, Ph.D.
Hiller Professor of Bioengineering and Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering
John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard University

Date: Thursday, November 18, 2021
Time: 3:30-4:30 PM EST
Zoom – check email for link or contact ksas@seas.upenn.edu
This seminar will be held virtually, but students registered for BE 699 can gather to watch in Moore 216.

Abstract: Ionic liquids, the liquid salts comprising organic anions and cations, offer exciting opportunities for several therapeutic applications. Their tunable properties offer control over their design and function. Starting with biocompatible ions, we synthesized a library of ionic liquids and explored them for various drug delivery applications. Ionic liquids provided unique advantages including overcoming the biological transport barriers of skin, buccal mucosa and the intestinal epithelium. At the same time, they also stabilized proteins and nucleic acids and enabled the delivery of biologics across these barriers. Ionic liquids also provided unique biological functions including adjuvancy towards vaccines and antimicrobial function. I will present an overview of the design features of ionic liquids and novel biomedical applications enabled by these unique materials.

Samir Mitragotri Bio: Samir Mitragotri is the Hiller Professor of Bioengineering and Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. His research is focused on transdermal, oral, and targeted drug delivery systems. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Inventors. He is also a foreign member of Indian National Academy of Engineering. He is also an elected fellow of AAAS, CRS, BMES, AIMBE, and AAPS. He is an author of over 350 publications, an inventor on over 200 patent/patent applications, and a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. He received his BS in Chemical Engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, India and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the Editor-in-Chief of AIChE’s and SBE’s journal Bioengineering and Translational Medicine.

BE Seminar: “Material Design for Lymph Node Drug Delivery and Immunomodulation” (Susan Thomas)

Susan Thomas, Ph.D.

Speaker: Susan N. Thomas, Ph.D.
Woodruff Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Parker H. Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Bioscience
Georgia Institute of Technology

Date: Thursday, September 23, 2021
Time: 3:30-4:30 PM EDT
Zoom – check email for link or contact ksas@seas.upenn.edu
This virtual seminar will be held over Zoom. Students registered for BE 699 can gather to watch live in Moore 216, 200 S. 33rd Street.

Abstract: Lymph nodes mediate the co-mingling of cells of the adaptive system to coordinate adaptive immune response. Drug delivery principles and technologies our group has developed to leverage the potential of lymph nodes as immunotherapeutic drug targets to augment anti-cancer therapeutic effects will be described.

Susan Thomas Bio: Susan Napier Thomas is a Woodruff Associate Professor with tenure of Mechanical Engineering in the Parker H. Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she holds adjunct appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Biological Science and is a member of the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. Prior to this appointment, she was a Whitaker postdoctoral scholar at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering cum laude from the University of California Los Angeles and her Ph.D. as in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow from The Johns Hopkins University. For her contributions to the emerging field of immunoengineering, she has been honored with the 2018 Young Investigator Award from the Society for Biomaterials for “outstanding achievements in the field of biomaterials research” and the 2013 Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society “in recognition of high level of originality and ingenuity in a scientific work in biomedical engineering.” Her interdisciplinary research program is supported by multiple awards from the National Cancer Institute, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the Susan G. Komen Foundation, amongst others.

Becoming a Bioengineer, Both at Home and On Campus

by Erica K. Brockmeier

The junior year BE-MAD lab series includes modules on dialysis, drug delivery, insect limb control, microfluidics, cell-cell communication, ECG analysis (pictured here), and spectroscopy. (Image: Bioengineering Educational Lab)

While the majority of courses remained online this spring, a small number of lab-based undergraduate courses were able to resume limited in-person instruction. One course was BE 310, the second semester of the Bioengineering Modeling, Analysis, and Design lab sequence. Better known as BE-MAD, this junior-year bioengineering course was able to bring students back to the teaching lab safely this spring while adapting its curriculum to keep remote learners engaged with hands-on lab modules at home.

An Essential Step Towards Becoming a Bioengineer

After learning the basics of chemistry, physics, biology, and math during freshman year and studying bioengineering fundamentals throughout sophomore year, BE-MAD is designed to provide essential hands-on experience to bioengineering majors during their junior years. In BE-MAD, students integrate what they’ve learned so far in the classroom to addressing complex, real-world problems by breaking down the silos that exist across different STEM fields.

“Usually what we hear from students is that this BE 309/310 sequence is when they really feel like they are engineers,” says Brian Chow, one of the BE 310 instructors. “They can put what they learn in classes to work in some practical setting and applied context.”

BE-MAD is also an important course to prepare students for senior design and is designed to be a “safe space to fail,” allowing students to build confidence through trial and error within a supportive environment, explains Sevile G. Mannickarottu, director of the educational laboratories. “We’re trying to build skills needed for senior year as well as teaching students how to think critically about problems by pulling together the materials they’ve learned all in one place,” he says. “By senior year, we want them to, when presented with a problem, not be afraid.”

Adapting BE-MAD for Both Remote and Hybrid Instruction

Traditionally, the BE-MAD lab is taught in the George H. Stephenson Foundation Educational Laboratory & Bio-MakerSpace, the primary bioengineering teaching lab, and includes modules on dialysis, drug delivery, insect limb control, microfluidics, cell-cell communication, ECG analysis, and spectroscopy. In the fall, the first lab in the series (BE-309) pivoted to remote learning using video tutorials of lab experiments and providing real data to students for analysis.

This spring, with more aspects of on-campus life able to reopen, the Educational Laboratory staff and BE-MAD instructors developed protocols in collaboration with David Meaney, Penn Engineering senior associate dean and an instructor for BE 309, and Penn’s Environmental Health and Radiation Safety office to safely reopen the teaching lab and Bio-MakerSpace for both BE-310 and for bioengineering senior design students.

The BE-MAD lab was also recreated on Gather.Town, an online video chat platform where students can speak with group members or instructors. Student groups also had their own tables where they could meet virtually to work on data analysis and lab report writing.

To continue to meet the needs of remote students, BE 310 instructor Lukasz Bugaj says that the curriculum was adapted to be two parallel courses—one that could be done entirely at home and the other in-person. The challenge was to adjust the content so that it could be completed either in-person or virtually, and could be switched from in-person to virtual at a moment’s notice because of COVID precautions, all while maximizing the hands-on experience, says Bugaj. “That’s a real credit to the lab staff of Sevile and Michael Patterson, who put a lot of work into revamping this entire class.”

Read the full story in Penn Today.

New Research from Penn Engineering and MIT Shows How Nanoparticles Can Turn Off Genes in Bone Marrow

Michael Mitchell
Michael Mitchell, PhD

by Evan Lerner

Using specialized nanoparticles, researchers from Penn Engineering and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a way to turn off specific genes in cells of bone marrow, which play an important role in producing blood cells. These particles could be tailored to help treat heart disease or to boost the yield of stem cells in patients who need stem cell transplants.

This type of genetic therapy, known as RNA interference, is usually difficult to target to organs other than the liver, where nanoparticles would tend to accumulate. The researchers were able to modify their particles in such a way that they would accumulate in the cells found in the bone marrow.

In a recent Nature Biomedical Engineering study, conducted in mice, the researchers showed that they could use this approach to improve recovery after a heart attack by inhibiting the release of bone marrow blood cells that promote inflammation and contribute to heart disease.

“If we can get these particles to hit other organs of interest, there could be a broader range of disease applications to explore, and one that we were really interested in in this paper was the bone marrow. The bone marrow is a site for hematopoiesis of blood cells, and these give rise to a whole lineage of cells that contribute to various types of diseases,” says Michael Mitchell, Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in Penn Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering, one of the lead authors of the study.

Marvin Krohn-Grimberghe, a cardiologist at the Freiburg University Heart Center in Germany, and Maximilian Schloss, a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), are also lead authors on the paper, which appears today in Nature Biomedical Engineering. The paper’s senior authors are Daniel Anderson, a professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and Matthias Nahrendorf, a professor of Radiology at MGH.

Mitchell’s expertise is in the design of nanoparticles and other drug delivery vehicles, engineering them to cross biological barriers that normally block foreign agents. In 2018, he received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to support research on delivering therapeutics to bone marrow, a key component of this new study.

The researchers have shown they can deliver nanoparticles to the bone marrow, influencing their function with RNA silencing. At top right, the bone marrow is not yet treated with particles that turn off a gene called SDF1. At bottom right, the number of neutrophils (blue) decreases, indicating that they have been released from bone marrow after treatment. At left, treatment with a control nanoparticle does not affect the number of neutrophils before and after treatment.

Read the full story at Penn Engineering Today.

Penn Bioengineering Postdoc Rachel Riley Named Assistant Professor at Rowan University

Rachel Riley, Ph.D.

The Department of Bioengineering is proud to congratulate Postdoctoral Fellow Rachel Riley on her appointment as an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Rowan University starting September 2020.

Originally from Matawan, NJ, Riley has been an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mitchell Lab since 2018. Her move to a faculty position at Rowan marks a return, as she received her B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering there in 2012. Riley went on to receive her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in 2018 at the University of Delaware with Emily Day, Ph.D. before joining the lab of Michael J. Mitchell, Ph.D., Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation, later that year. The Mitchell Lab’s research lies at the interface of biomaterials science, drug delivery, and cellular and molecular bioengineering to fundamentally understand and therapeutically target biological barriers.

“Rachel has had a prolific academic career at the University of Delaware and at Penn, launching several exciting research projects and mentoring the next generation of STEM researchers,” Mitchell says. “I’m very hopeful that her new position as an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Rowan University will permit her to engineer new drug delivery technologies for women’s health applications.”

Research in the Riley Lab at Rowan will explore how nanoparticle drug delivery technologies can be engineered specifically for applications in women’s health. They will use nanoparticles as tools to study and treat gynecological cancers, fetal diseases, and pregnancy complications. Riley’s ultimate goal is to gain a fundamental understanding of how nanoparticle structure influences delivery to gynecological tissues to enable them to take an engineering approach to tackle new applications in women’s health.

Riley says that she is committed to supporting women and minorities in STEM disciplines and she looks forward to continuing collaborations with Penn and starting new collaborations with researchers at Cooper Medical School at Rowan University (CMSRU). Congratulations, Dr. Riley!

Oncology/Engineering Review Published

oncology
Mike Mitchell, Ph.D.

Michael Mitchell, Ph.D., who will arrive in the Spring 2018 semester as assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering, is the first author on a new review published in Nature Reviews Cancer on the topic of engineering and the physical sciences and their contributions to oncology. The review was authored with Rakesh K. Jain, Ph.D., who is Andrew Werk Cook Professor of Radiation Oncology (Tumor Biology) at Harvard Medical School, and Robert Langer, Sc.D., who is Institute Professor in Chemical Engineering at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Dr. Mitchell is currently in his final semester as a postdoctoral fellow at the Koch Institute and is a member of Dr. Langer’s lab at MIT.

The review focuses on four key areas of development for oncology in recent years: the physical microenvironment of the tumor; technological advances in drug delivery; cellular and molecular imaging; and microfluidics and microfabrication. Asked about the review, Dr. Mitchell said, “We’ve seen exponential growth at the interface of engineering and physical sciences over the last decade, specifically through these advances. These novel tools and technologies have not only advanced our fundamental understanding of the basic biology of cancer but also have accelerated the discovery and translation of new cancer therapeutics.”