Continuing with our series of interviews with new faculty members, we feature this interview with Dr. Joel Boerckel, who has a dual appointment in the Department of Bioengineering at Penn and the Perelman School of Medicine’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. Dr. Boerckel’s research concerns the mechanobiology of development and regeneration. Here, he speaks with Andrew Mathis about his career to this point and where he sees the fields of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine heading over the future. Enjoy!
The vast majority of genetic mutations that are associated with disease occur at sites in the genome that aren’t genes. These sequences of DNA don’t code for proteins themselves, but provide an additional layer of instructions that determine if and when particular genes are expressed. Researchers are only beginning to understand how the non-coding regions of the genome influence gene expression and might be disrupted in disease.
Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, studies the three-dimensional folding of the genome and the role it plays in brain development. When a stretch of DNA folds, it creates a higher-order structure called a looping interaction, or “loop.” In doing so, it brings non-coding sites into physical contact with their target genes, precisely regulating gene expression in space and time during development.
Phillips-Cremins and lab member Jonathan Beagan have led a new study identifying a new protein that connects loops in embryonic stem cells as they begin to differentiate into types of neurons. Though the study was conducted in mice, these findings inform aspects of human brain development, including how the genetic material folds in the 3-D nucleus and is reconfigured as stem cells become specialized. Better understanding of these mechanisms may be relevant to a wide range of neurodevelopmental disorders.
Cremins lab members Michael Duong, Katelyn Titus, Linda Zhou, Zhendong Cao, Jingjing Ma, Caroline Lachanski and Daniel Gillis also contributed to the study, which was published in the journal Genome Research.
Jason Burdick, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Bioengineering, was among the recent recipients of a grant from Sharing Partnership for Innovative Research in Translation (SPIRiT), a pilot grant program awarded by the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Dr. Burdick’s research, undertaken with Albert Sinusas, MD, of Yale, concerns the development of a noninvasive treatment to limit the damage to the heart caused by heart attacks, which are suffered annually by almost 750,000 Americans. Using single-photo emission computed tomography (SPECT), the technique identifies the damaged heart muscle on the basis of enzymes activated by damage, followed by the targeted administration of bioengineered hydrogels for the delivery of therapeutics
Dr. Burdick says, “This research has the potential to advance treatments for the many individuals with heart attacks who have few current options. Our approach uses injectable materials and advanced imaging techniques to address the changes in protease levels after heart attacks that can lead to tissue damage.”
In other news, Dr. Burdick was one of 12 researchers named by the NIH’s Center for Engineering Complex Tissues to lead collaborative projects aimed at generating complex tissues for several parts of the body.
As we reported earlier, Dan Huh, Wilf Family Term Chair & Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering, has been awarded a $1 million grant from the Cancer Research Institute (CRI), along with its first CRI Technology Impact Award.
Recently, the Penn Engineering Blog featured a story on Dr. Huh’s grant and the research it will support for the next three years. You can read the story at the SEAS blog.
Here’s the promised interview with new faculty member Mike Mitchell, who starts as assistant professor of bioengineering at Penn in the Spring 2017 semester. Mike and editor Andrew E. Mathis discuss Mike’s background and education, where cancer research is now and where it’s heading, and just how big the radius is on the cheesesteak zone of impact around Philadelphia.
Dennis E. Discher, Ph.D., Robert D. Bent Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and a secondary faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering, was the lead author on a recent study that showed that engineered macrophages (a type of immune cell) could be injected into mice, circulate through their bodies, and invade solid tumors in the mice, engulfing human cancers cells in the tumors.
According to Cory Alvey, a graduate student in pharmacology who works in Professor Discher’s lab and the first author on the paper, said, “Combined with cancer-specific targeting antibodies, these engineered macrophages swarm into solid tumors and rapidly drive regression of human tumors without any measurable toxicity.”
As noted earlier this week, Penn BE will be bringing in three new faculty members over the coming academic year, starting with Alex Hughes, who will start in the fall semester. Here’s the first of our series of podcasts with the new faculty, to come each Friday this month. Enjoy!
(P.S. Apologies for the rough version of the audio. We are still learning!)
We are thrilled to announce the successful recruitment of three (!) new faculty members to the department. We conducted a national faculty search and could not decide on one — we wanted all three of our finalists! We are very happy that they chose Penn and think we can provide an amazing environment for their education and research programs.
Alex Hughes, Ph.D.
Alex Hughes, Ph.D., will join us in the Spring 2018 semester. Dr. Hughes comes to us from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he is a postdoctoral fellow. Alex’s research regards determining what he calls the “design rules” underlying how cells assemble into tissues during development, both to better understand these tissues and to engineer methods to build them from scratch
Lukasz Bugaj, Ph.D.
Lukasz Bugaj, Ph.D., will arrive in the Spring 2018 semester. Dr. Bugaj is also coming here from UCSF following a postdoc, and his work is in the field of optogenetics — a scientific process whereby light is used to alter protein conformation, thereby giving one a tool to manipulate cells. In particular, Lukasz’s research has established the ability to induce proteins to cluster ‘on demand’ using light, and he wants to use these and other new technologies he invented to study cell signaling in stem cells and in cancer.
Mike Mitchell, Ph.D.
Mike Mitchell, Ph.D., will also join us in the Spring 2018 semester after finishing his postdoctoral fellowship at MIT in the Langer Lab. In his research, Dr. Mitchell seeks to engineer cells in the bone marrow and blood vessels as a way of gaining control over how and why cancer metastasizes. Mike’s work has already had impressive results in animal models of cancer. His lab will employ tools and concepts from cellular engineering, biomaterials science, and drug delivery to fundamentally understand and therapeutically target complex biological barriers in the body.
In the coming month, we’ll feature podcasts of interview with each of the new faculty members, as well as with Konrad Kording, so be sure to keep an eye out for those.
A Penn Bioengineering professor, Paul Ducheyne, Ph.D., is the editor-in-chief of the new second edition of Comprehensive Biomaterials II, released by Elsevier on June 1. The seven-volume collection, which Dr. Ducheyne edited along with faculty members from the University of California, Berkeley, Queensland University of Technology (Australia), University of Utah, and Johannes Gutenberg University Medical Center (Germany), collects articles written by experts in the field of biomaterials.
According to Elsevier, the articles “address the current status of nearly all biomaterials in the field, their strengths and weaknesses, their future prospects, appropriate analytical methods and testing, device applications and performance, emerging candidate materials as competitors and disruptive technologies, research and development, regulatory management, commercial aspects, and applications, including medical applications.”
In the preface to the collection, Dr. Ducheyne details how his team and Elsevier worked together to assure the continued high impact of the text by issuing it in both a print version and online via Elsevier’s Science Direct platform. He writes further, “It was the objective of the editorial team to compose the publication with chapters that would provide strategic insights for those working in diverse biomaterials applications, research and development, regulatory management, and industry.”
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a grant to Brian Chow, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering, to study ultrafast genetically encoded voltage indicators (GEVIs). GEVIs are proteins that can detect changes in the electrical output of cells and report those changes by emitting different color light. His research seeks to create GEVIs that can report these changes much more rapidly – in fact, more than a million times more quickly than the velocity of the changes themselves – and apply these ultrafast GEVIs to the study of the brain.
The NIH-funded research will build on earlier research, employing de novo fluorescent proteins (dFPs) created in Dr. Chow’s lab. These dFPs, which are totally artificial and unrelated to natural proteins, report voltage changes in neurons by changing in brightness. Working with a team of investigators that includes faculty members from the Departments of Biochemistry & Biophysics and Neuroscience, Dr. Chow hopes to develop these ultrafast GEVIs.
“Monitoring thousands of neurons in parallel will shed new light on cognition, learning and memory, mood, and the physiological underpinnings of nervous system disorders,” he says.
