health – Penn Bioengineering Blog

Paul Gehret and Riccardo Gottardi accept the International Society for Biofabrication New Investigator Award onstage at the international conference. — Paul Gehret (left) and Riccardo Gottardi, PhD, at Biofabrication 2022, the International Conference on Biofabrication.

Bioengineering researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia are developing a less invasive and quicker method to create cartilage implants as an alternative to the current treatment for severe subglottic stenosis, which occurs in 10 percent of premature infants in the U.S.

Subglottic stenosis is a narrowing of the airway, in response to intubation. Severe cases require laryngotracheal reconstruction that involves grafting cartilage from the rib cage with an invasive surgery. With grant support from the National Institutes of Health, Riccardo Gottardi, PhD, who leads the Bioengineering and Biomaterials (Bio²) Lab at CHOP, is refining a technology called Meniscal Decellularized scaffold (MEND). Working with a porcine model meniscus, the researchers remove blood vessels and elastin fibers to create pathways that allow for recellularization. Dr. Gottardi and his team then harvest ear cartilage progenitor cells (CPCs) with a minimally invasive biopsy, combine them with MEND, and create cartilage implants that could be a substitute for the standard laryngotracheal reconstruction.

This work and similar work on the tympanic membrane earned Paul Gehret, a doctoral student in the Gottardi Lab, the International Society for Biofabrication New Investigator Award and the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine Young Investigator Award. Gehret and Dr. Gottardi accepted the awards at Biofabrication 2022, the International Conference on Biofabrication, in Pisa Italy.

While laryngotracheal reconstruction in the adult population has a success rate of up to 96%, success rates in children range from 75% to 85%, and children often require revision surgery due to a high incidence of restenosis. The procedure also involves major surgery to remove cartilage from the rib cage, which is more difficult for childrens’ smaller bodies.

“Luckily not many children suffer from severe subglottic stenosis, but for those who do, it is really serious,” said Dr. Gottardi, who also is assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Department of Bioengineering at CHOP and the University of Pennsylvania. “With our procedure, we have an easily accessible source for the cartilage and the cells, providing a straightforward and noninvasive treatment option with much potential.”

Read the full story in CHOP’s Cornerstone Blog.

Riccardo Gottardi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Pulmonary Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine and in the Department of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He also holds an appointment in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).

Paul Gehret is a Ph.D. student in Bioengineering, an Ashton Fellow and a NSF Fellow. His research focuses on leveraging decellularized cartilage scaffolds and novel cell sources to reconstruct the pediatric airway.

July 7, 2023July 6, 2023

Breaking Down Barriers to Blood Donation for LGBTQ+ People

by Meredith Mann

Close-up of a person's arm and hand as they donate blood. — (Image: iStock/hxdbzxy)

For decades, LGBTQ+ patients have faced stringent requirements to donate blood—most gay and bisexual men were not allowed to donate at all. Now, however, many more of them will be able to give this selfless gift. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates blood donation in this country, has reworked the donor-screening criteria, and in the process opened the door to donation for more Americans.

The previous restriction on accepting blood from men who have sex with men (MSM) dates back to the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when blood donations weren’t able to be screened for HIV, leading to cases of transfusion-transmitted HIV. In 1985, the FDA instituted a lifetime ban on blood donation for MSM, effectively preventing gay and bisexual men from donating. (Also included were women who have sex with MSM.)

Twenty years later, the agency rescinded the ban—but added a restriction that only MSM who had been abstinent from sex for at least one year could donate. In 2020, the FDA shortened the “deferral” period to 90 days of abstinence. While the changes were welcome news for those who had been unable to donate, they still prevented many MSM from giving blood. As he wrote in an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer last year, Kevin B. Johnson, the David L. Cohen University Professor with appointments in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Perelman School of Medicine, and Annenberg School for Communication, was one of them. He and his husband were shocked to learn when they went to donate blood during a shortage early in the COVID-19 pandemic, that despite being married and monogamous for close to 17 years, they could not donate unless they were celibate for three months.

“It is time to move quickly to a policy under which all donors are evaluated equally and fairly, and to encourage local blood collection facilities to comply with that policy,” Johnson wrote last year.

Now, such changes are underway. As the pandemic wound down, the FDA moved forward with plans to re-evaluate its donation criteria. The first big change was removal of an indefinite ban on people who lived in or spent significant amounts of time in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and France, a measure that aimed to protect the U.S. blood supply against Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD; also known as “mad cow disease”), a terminal brain condition caused by hard-to-detect prions that occurred in those countries in the 1980s and 1990s.

Extensive and careful evaluation of epidemiological studies and statistical analysis has shown that the risk of CJD transmission is no longer a concern. The changes to eligibility for LGBTQ+ patients are related to advances in medical and social science, and have also been very thoroughly studied to ensure that the changes will maintain the safety of the blood supply without being discriminatory.

“In the decades since HIV was first recognized, there have been advances in testing methods for detection of the virus, changes in how we process blood products, public health advances, and extensive study of the evolving risk of disease transmission given these advances,” says Sarah Nassau, vice chair of pathology and laboratory medicine at Lancaster General Hospital.

They also draw on rethinking the reliability of the guidelines. For example, while the rules partially or fully prevented gay and bisexual men from donating blood, they did not erect similar barriers to other people engaging in anal sex, or people who have multiple partners.

“Specifying the sexual orientation of the person rather than a behavior in which they engaged was discriminatory and not evidence based,” points out Judd David Flesch, vice chief of inpatient operations in the Department of Medicine at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center and co-director of the Penn Medicine Program for LGBT Health.

Read the full story in Penn Medicine News.

Kevin Johnson is the David L. Cohen University of Pennsylvania Professor in the Departments of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics and Computer and Information Science. As a Penn Integrates Knowlegde (PIK) University Professor, Johnson also holds appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering and Pediatrics, as well as in the Annenberg School of Communication.

June 7, 2023

Nanorobotic Systems Presents New Options for Targeting Fungal Infections

by Nathi Magubane

Candida albicans is a species of yeast that is a normal part of the human microbiota but can also cause severe infections that pose a significant global health risk due to their resistance to existing treatments, so much so that the World Health Organization has highlighted this as a priority issue. The picture above shows a before (left) and after (right) fluorescence image of fungal biofilms being precisely targeted by nanozyme microrobots without bonding to or disturbing the tissue sample. (Image: Min Jun Oh and Seokyoung Yoon)

Infections caused by fungi, such as Candida albicans, pose a significant global health risk due to their resistance to existing treatments, so much so that the World Health Organization has highlighted this as a priority issue.

Although nanomaterials show promise as antifungal agents, current iterations lack the potency and specificity needed for quick and targeted treatment, leading to prolonged treatment times and potential off-target effects and drug resistance.

Now, in a groundbreaking development with far-reaching implications for global health, a team of researchers jointly led by Hyun (Michel) Koo of the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine and Edward Steager of Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science has created a microrobotic system capable of rapid, targeted elimination of fungal pathogens.

“Candida forms tenacious biofilm infections that are particularly hard to treat,” Koo says. “Current antifungal therapies lack the potency and specificity required to quickly and effectively eliminate these pathogens, so this collaboration draws from our clinical knowledge and combines Ed’s team and their robotic expertise to offer a new approach.”

The team of researchers is a part of Penn Dental’s Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry, an initiative that leverages engineering and computational approaches to uncover new knowledge for disease mitigation and advance oral and craniofacial health care innovation.

For this paper, published in Advanced Materials, the researchers capitalized on recent advancements in catalytic nanoparticles, known as nanozymes, and they built miniature robotic systems that could accurately target and quickly destroy fungal cells. They achieved this by using electromagnetic fields to control the shape and movements of these nanozyme microrobots with great precision.

“The methods we use to control the nanoparticles in this study are magnetic, which allows us to direct them to the exact infection location,” Steager says. “We use iron oxide nanoparticles, which have another important property, namely that they’re catalytic.”

Read the full story in Penn Today.

Hyun (Michel) Koo is a professor in the Department of Orthodontics and in the divisions of Pediatric Dentistry and Community Oral Health and is the co-founder of the Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry in the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group.

Edward Steager is a research investigator in the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception Laboratory at Penn.

Other authors include Min Jun Oh, Alaa Babeer, Yuan Liu, Zhi Ren, Zhenting Xiang, Yilan Miao, and Chider Chen of Penn Dental; and David P. Cormode and Seokyoung Yoon of the Perelman School of Medicine. Cormode also holds a secondary appointment in Bioengineering.

This research was supported in part by the National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research (R01 DE025848, R56 DE029985, R90DE031532 and; the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea of the Ministry of Education (NRF-2021R1A6A3A03044553).

May 19, 2023May 18, 2023

Michael Mitchell and Kyle Vining Win IDEA Prize from CiPD and Penn Health-Tech

Kyle Vining

Michael J. Mitchell, J. Peter and Geri Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in Bioengineering, and Kyle Vining, Assistant Professor in Materials Science and Engineering and in Penn Dental Medicine and member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group, have been awarded the second-annual IDEA (Innovation in Dental Medicine and Engineering to Advance Oral Health) Prize, issued by the Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry (CiPD) and Penn Health-Tech.

“Through their collaborative research, they are aiming to develop next-generation treatments for dental caries (tooth-decay) using lipid nanoparticles, the same delivery vehicles employed in the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine technology.

‘This project shows the type of innovative ideas and collaborations that we are kickstarting through the IDEA prize,’ says Dr. Michel Koo, co-director of the CiPD and Professor at Penn Dental Medicine. ‘This is a great example of synergistic interaction at the interface of engineering and oral health’ adds Dr. Kate Stebe, co-director of the CiPD and Professor at Penn Engineering.”

Read the full announcement in Penn Dental Medicine News.

October 11, 2022

Penn Bioengineering Alumna Cynthia Reinhart-King Invited to White House Summit

Cynthia Reinhart-King, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University, was one of a handful of experts invited to take part in the White House Summit in Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing on September 14, 2022 in Washington, D.C. Reinhart-King and her colleagues gathered to discuss “bio-based solutions to global challenges ranging from food security and climate change to health security and supply chain disruptions.”

Reinhart-King is an alumna of Penn Bioengineering, graduating with her doctorate in 2006. She delivered the Grace Hopper Lecture for Penn Engineering in 2019, and was named President-Elect of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), the largest professional society for biomedical engineers, in 2021.

Read “Preeminent engineering researcher takes part in national summit on biotechnology and biomanufacturing” in Vanderbilt University Research News.

May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

Moving Away From ‘Average,’ Toward the Individual

by Michele W. Berger

In a course from Annenberg’s David Lydon-Staley, seven graduate students conducted single-participant experiments. This approach, what’s known as an “n of 1,” may better capture the nuances of a diverse population than randomized control trials can.

David Lydon-Staley is an assistant professor of communication and principal investigator of the Addiction, Health, & Adolescence Lab in the Annenberg School for Communication.

To prep for an upcoming course he was teaching, Penn researcher David Lydon-Staley decided to conduct an experiment: Might melatonin gummies—supplements touted to improve sleep—help him, as an individual, fall asleep faster?

For two weeks, he took two gummies on intervention nights and none on control nights. The point, however, wasn’t really to find out whether the gummies worked for him (which they didn’t), but rather to see how an experiment with a single participant played out, what’s known as an “n of 1.”

Randomized control experiments typically include hundreds or thousands of participants. Their aim is to show, on average, how the intervention being studied affects people in the treatment group. But often “there’s a failure to include women and members of minoritized racial and ethnic groups in those clinical trials,” says Lydon-Staley, an assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication. “The single-case approach says, instead of randomizing a lot of people, we’re going to take one person at a time and measure them intensively.”

In Lydon-Staley’s spring semester class, Diversity and the End of Average, seven graduate students conducted their own n-of-1 experiments—on themselves—testing whether dynamic stretching might improve basketball performance or whether yoga might decrease stress. One wanted to understand the effect of journaling on emotional clarity. They also learned about representation in science, plus which analytical approaches might best capture the nuance of a diverse population and individuals with many intersecting identities.

“It’s not just an ‘n of 1’ trying to do what the big studies are doing. It’s a different perspective,” says Lydon-Staley. “Though it’s just one person, you’re getting a much more thorough characterization of how they’re changing from moment to moment.”

Read the full story in Penn Today.

David Lydon-Staley is an Assistant Professor of communication and principal investigator of the Addiction, Health, & Adolescence Lab in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Lydon-Staley is a former postdoctoral research in the Complex Systems Lab of Dani S. Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in Bioengineering and in Electrical and Systems Engineering.

April 19, 2022

Kevin Johnson Discusses the Future of the Electronic Health Record

Kevin B. Johnson, M.D., M.S., was featured in Cincinnati Children’s Hospital’s “Envisioning Our Future for Children” speaker series, discussing “the evolution of the EHR and its future directions.” An electronic health record, or EHR, is a digital record of a patient’s chart, recording health information and data, coordinating orders, tracking results, and providing patient support. Johnson “predicts a new wave of transformation in digital health technologies that could make rapid progress” in several areas of medicine, including reducing cost and improving patience outcomes. Johnson is Vice President for Applied Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania Health System and the David L. Cohen University Professor with appointments in Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics and Computer and Information Science and secondary appointments in the Annenberg School for Communication, Pediatrics, and Bioengineering.

Read “What Will It Take to Make EHR a Partner Instead of a Burden?” in the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Research Horizons blog. View Johnson’s seminar talk on the Envisioning Our Future website.

March 28, 2022

Penn Bioengineering Student Laila Barakat Norford Named Goldwater Scholar

Five University of Pennsylvania undergraduates have received 2022 Goldwater Scholarships, including Laila Barakat Norford, a third year Bioengineering major from Wayne, Pennsylvania. Goldwater Scholarships are awarded to sophomores or juniors planning research careers in mathematics, the natural sciences, or engineering.

She is among the 417 students named 2022 Goldwater Scholars from the 1,242 students nominated by 433 academic institutions in the United States, according to the Barry Goldwater Scholarship & Excellence in Education Foundation. Each scholarship provides as much as $7,500 each year for as many as two years of undergraduate study.

Penn has produced 23 Goldwater Scholars in the past seven years and a total of 55 since Congress established the scholarship in 1986.

Laila Barakat Norford is majoring in bioengineering with minors in computer science and bioethics in Penn Engineering. As a Rachleff Scholar, Norford has been engaged in systems biology research since her first year. Her current research uses machine learning to predict cell types in intestinal organoids from live-cell images, enabling the mechanisms of development and disease to be characterized in detail. At Penn, she is an Orientation Peer Advisor, a volunteer with Advancing Women in Engineering and the Penn Society of Women Engineers, and a teaching assistant for introductory computer science. She is secretary of the Penn Band, plays the clarinet, and is a member of the Band’s Fanfare Honor Society for service and leadership. Norford registers voters with Penn Leads the Vote and canvasses for state government candidates. She is also involved in Penn’s LGBTQ+ community as a member of PennAces. Norford plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computational biology, aspiring to build computational tools to address understudied diseases and health disparities.

The students applied for the Goldwater Scholarship with assistance from Penn’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships.

Read about all five 2022 Penn Goldwater Scholars in Penn Today.

November 5, 2021November 5, 2021

Penn Researchers Show ‘Encrypted’ Peptides Could be Wellspring of Natural Antibiotics

by Melissa Pappas

While biologists and chemists race to develop new antibiotics to combat constantly mutating bacteria, predicted to lead to 10 million deaths by 2050, engineers are approaching the problem through a different lens: finding naturally occurring antibiotics in the human genome.

The billions of base pairs in the genome are essentially one long string of code that contains the instructions for making all of the molecules the body needs. The most basic of these molecules are amino acids, the building blocks for peptides, which in turn combine to form proteins. However, there is still much to learn about how — and where — a particular set of instructions are encoded.

Now, bringing a computer science approach to a life science problem, an interdisciplinary team of Penn researchers have used a carefully designed algorithm to discover a new suite of antimicrobial peptides, hiding deep within this code.

The study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, was led by César de la Fuente, Presidential Assistant Professor in Bioengineering, Microbiology, Psychiatry, and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, spanning both Penn Engineering and Penn Medicine, and his postdocs Marcelo Torres and Marcelo Melo. Collaborators Orlando Crescenzi and Eugenio Notomista of the University of Naples Federico II also contributed to this work.

“The human body is a treasure trove of information, a biological dataset. By using the right tools, we can mine for answers to some of the most challenging questions,” says de la Fuente. “We use the word ‘encrypted’ to describe the antimicrobial peptides we found because they are hidden within larger proteins that seem to have no connection to the immune system, the area where we expect to find this function.”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

June 3, 2021July 14, 2021

Guest Post: Learning About Regulatory Affairs Through a Virtual Internship

by Casey Colleran (BSE 2021, MSE 2022)

In this guest post, recent Penn Bioengineering graduate and master’s student Casey Colleran writes about her experience in virtual internship at Janssen Pharmaceuticals.

During the summer of 2020, I was privileged enough to join the Global Regulatory Affairs team at Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson. Despite the uncertainties brought on by COVID-19, Janssen was able to bring together a group of five interns to participate in this virtual internship. This remote opportunity provided me with a valuable understanding of Regulatory Affairs, and the pharmaceutical industry. Throughout the 11 weeks, I was able to work alongside Regulatory Scientists in several functional areas of the organization. I learned about the regulations that govern the pharmaceutical industry, and the strategy that goes into communicating with the FDA and other health authorities.

As we rotated through each of these functional areas, myself and the other interns were also able to observe how the pandemic impacted the organization. We were asked to develop our own solutions on how to address these new challenges. Through this task, I learned how to present information in a meaningful way, analyze anecdotal data, improve processes, and communicate across different networks. As a team, myself and four other interns developed probing questions to help us understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the regulatory landscape, and the different strengths and opportunities employees observed in Janssen’s response to the pandemic. As we rotated through the different functional areas of Janssen’s Global Regulatory Affairs group, we used that time to ask our questions, and make note of anecdotal data that would provide us more insight as to how to address the new challenges brought on by the pandemic, and the virtual work environment. We then created a “COVID-19 Playbook” which broke down the main themes we had heard in our responses, such as the need for a more flexible organization, more efficient and effective communication, improved connectivity in the virtual workplace, and more. We developed suggestions on programming and guidelines that would help strengthen each of these areas, and presented these suggestions to the Senior Leadership Team.

Leadership development opportunities were also focal to the internship. I was paired with several amazing mentors who provided me with personalized feedback on how to become a more effective leader. The culture of the organization was extremely welcoming, and I cherish the relationships that I was able to build with my colleagues, so much so that I joined Janssen as a part time contractor this past year. Through this role as a contractor, I have been able to learn more about the day-to-day activities of a Regulatory Scientist through hands-on activities. As a contractor, I have been an integral part of a new “FLEx” Program. As a part of this program, I offer support to Regulatory Scientists by taking on their more routine submissions, giving them the opportunity to work on more strategic based activities, and focus on their personal growth and learning. It has been such a wonderful experience to work closely with these Regulatory Scientists who are still early in their career, as we have been able to learn from each other as well. It has also given me a greater understanding of the regulatory landscape, and by taking part in this new program I again get to see much of my feedback be considered and implemented.

I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to work in such an amazing environment, developed so many skills, and built a network that led me to additional opportunities in Regulatory Affairs at Janssen.

Tag: health

Penn Bioengineers Create Non-invasive Cartilage Implants for Pediatric Subglottic Stenosis