healthcare – Penn Bioengineering Blog

July 17, 2024July 17, 2024

Penn ADAPT “Hacks” Bedsores, Wins Prize

Team Current Care (Andrew Lee, Antranig Baghdassarian, Johnson Liu, Leah Lackey, Brianna Leung, and Justin Liu), took home the $3,000 Grand Prize in the Cornell Hackathon.

Brianna Leung, a rising senior majoring in Bioengineering and minoring in Neuroscience and Healthcare Management at the University of Pennsylvania, led a diverse team of student scientists and engineers to resounding success at the 2024 Cornell Health Tech Hackathon, where the team won the $3,000 Grand Prize.

Held in March 2024 on Cornell’s campus in New York City, the event brought together students from 29 different universities for a weekend of finding “hacks” to patient wellness and healthcare issues inspired by the theme of “patient safety.”

ADAPT members enjoy a pancake-making marathon in preparation for their pancake sale.

Leung serves as President of Penn Assistive Devices and Prosthetic Technologies (ADAPT), a medical-device project club whose members pursue personal projects, community partnerships and national design competitions. Penn ADAPT’s activities range from designing, building and improving assistive medical devices for conditions such as cerebral palsy and limb loss, to community engagement activities like their semesterly 3D-printed pancake sale.

In her role, Leung has increased the program’s hackathon participation to give club members greater exposure to fast-paced, competition-based design. She also leads the HMS School project, which develops and manufactures switch interfaces for children with cerebral palsy, enabling these students to interact with computers.

Leung’s passion for medical devices extends to her academic research. As a member of the robotics lab of Cynthia Sung, Gabel Family Term Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Computer and Information Science, and Electrical and Systems Engineering, Leung characterizes origami patterns for energy-saving applications in the heart and in facial reconstruction. Leung has also served as Vice President External for the Penn Lions and Vice President of Member Engagement for the Wharton Undergraduate Healthcare Club, and belongs to the Phi Gamma Nu professional business fraternity.

ADAPT members working on medical devices.

For the Cornell Hackathon, Leung’s team developed a prototype for Current Care, a closed-loop device to prevent pressure ulcers through electrical muscle stimulation. Pressure ulcers, often called bed sores, result from prolonged pressure, which often occurs during extended hospitalization or in patients who are bedridden. This condition is exacerbated by understaffing and strained resources, and can create an extra burden on hospitals, patients and healthcare workers. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that pressure ulcers cost the U.S. healthcare system approximately $9.1 billion to $11.6 billion per year.

Current Care is designed to deliver electrical stimulation, which increases blood flow to affected body parts. Conceptualizing and designing complex devices on short notice is the nature of a hackathon, so the team focused their efforts on creating proof-of-concept prototypes for all the different sensors required for the device, as well as providing the judges with on-screen read-outs to demonstrate the logic and hypothetical inputs for the device.

For their design, the team was awarded the $3,000 Grand Prize in the Cornell Hackathon. In addition to Leung, the team consisted of Johnson Liu (Cornell ECE & MSE’26); Antranig Baghdassarian (Cornell BME’27); Andrew Lee (Weill Cornell M.D.’25); Leah Lackey (Cornell ECE Ph.D.’28); and Justin Liu (Northeastern CS’27).

In choosing a project, Leung was inspired by her late grandmother’s experiences. “My role on the team largely consisted of coordinating and leading aspects of its development as needed. I also ultimately presented our idea to the judges,” she says. “This was actually all of my teammates’ first hackathon, so it was really exciting to serve a new role (considering it was actually only my second hackathon!). I had a lot of fun working with them, and we have actually been meeting regularly since the event to continue to work on the project. We had a range of expertise and experience on our team, and I deeply appreciate their hard work and enthusiasm for a project that means so much to me.”

Having found success at the Cornell hackathon, the team is discussing next steps for Current Care. “Our team is still very motivated to continue working on the project, and we’ve been speaking with professors across all of our schools to discuss feasibility and design plans moving forward,” says Leung.

Several other projects developed by Penn ADAPT members were recognized in the Cornell Hackathon:

ADAPT members and Hackathon participants, left to right: Brianna Leung, Rebecca Wang, Claire Zhang, Amy Luo, Mariam Rizvi, Natey Kim, Joe Kojima. Also in attendance but not pictured: Suhani Patel, Harita Trivedi, Dwight Koyner.

Claire Zhang, a sophomore studying Bioengineering and Biology in the VIPER program, was a member and presenter for team CEDAR (winner of Most Innovative/2nd Place), a portable ultrasound imaging device used to monitor carotid artery stenosis development in rural areas.
Natey Kim, a sophomore in Bioengineering, was a member and presenter for team HMSS (finalist), a low-cost digital solution for forecasting infections in hospitals.
Rebecca Wang, a sophomore in Bioengineering and Social Chair of Penn ADAPT, was a member of Team Femnostics (winner of Most Market Ready/4th Place) which developed QuickSense, an all-in-one diagnostic tool that streamlines testing for a handful of the most common vaginal disease infections simultaneously.
Mariam Rizvi, a sophomore in Computational Biology, was a member of team IPVision (winner of Most Potential Impact/5th Place), an application programming interface (or API) that integrates into electronic health records such as Epic, leveraging AI to detect intimate partner violence cases and provide personalized treatment in acute-care settings.
Suhani Patel and Dwight Koyner worked with team RealAIs, which developed a full-stack multi-platform application using React Native and Vertex AI on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Patel, a sophomore double majoring in Bioengineering and Computer and Information Science in Penn Engineering, serves as ADAPT’s treasurer, while Koyner is a first-year M&T student studying Business and Systems Engineering in Penn Engineering and Wharton.

Team Femnostics from left to right: Antonia Li, Bhavishya Agarwal, Urmila Sehrawat, Rebecca Wang, Justin Xiang, and Edward Kim.

Learn more about Penn ADAPT here and follow their Instagram.

Read more about the 2024 Cornell Tech Hackathon in the Cornell Chronicle.

May 4, 2024May 1, 2024

The CiPD Partners with the Mack Institute for Innovation and Management to Develop Tooth-Brushing Robots

by Melissa Pappas

*Left to right: Hong-Huy Tran, Chrissie Jaruchotiratanasakul, Manali Mahajan (Photo Courtesy of CiPD)*

The Center for Innovation and Precision Dentistry (CiPD), a collaboration between Penn Engineering and Penn Dental Medicine, has partnered with Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management on a research project which brings robotics to healthcare. More specifically, this project will explore potential uses of nanorobot technology for oral health care. The interdisciplinary partnership brings together three students from different Penn programs to study the commercialization of a new technology that detects and removes harmful dental plaque.

“Our main goal is to bring together dental medicine and engineering for out-of-the-box solutions to address unresolved problems we face in oral health care,” says Hyun (Michel) Koo, Co-Founding Director of CiPD and Professor of Orthodontics. “We are focused on affordable solutions and truly disruptive technologies, which at the same time are feasible and translatable.”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

Michel Koo is a member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group. Read more stories featuring Koo in the BE Blog.

To learn more about this interdisciplinary research, please visit CiPD.

This press release has been adapted from the original published by the Mack Institute for Innovation Management.

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 14, 2023June 14, 2023

View the 2023 Department of Bioengineering Juneteenth Address by Dr. Kevin B. Johnson

Thank you to everyone who attended the 2023 Department of Bioengineering Juneteenth Address. For those who were unable to attend or who may wish to share the opportunity to view the lecture, a recording of Dr. Kevin Johnson’s talk, “A White Neighbor, a Black Surgeon, and a Mormon Computer Scientist Walk into a Bar…” is available below.

Speaker:
Kevin B. Johnson, MD, MS, FAAP, FAMIA, FACMI
David L. Cohen University Professor
Computer and Information Science
Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics
Bioengineering
Annenberg School for Communication
Pediatrics
VP for Applied Informatics (UPHS), University of Pennsylvania

Abstract:
As we recognize Juneteenth, a holiday that brings awareness to what journalist Corey Mitchell calls “…a complex understanding of the nation’s past,” we also need to understand how many of our neighbors, staff, and faculty — even those born in the last 100 years — continue to navigate through the environment that made Juneteenth remarkable. In this talk, Dr. Johnson shares a bit of his personal story and how this story informs his national service and passion for teaching.

June 9, 2023

2023 Department of Bioengineering Juneteenth Address: “A White Neighbor, a Black Surgeon, and a Mormon Computer Scientist Walk into a Bar…” (Kevin B. Johnson)

We hope you will join us for the 2023 Department of Bioengineering Juneteenth Address by Dr. Kevin B. Johnson.

Date: Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Start Time: 11:00 AM ET
Location: Berger Auditorium (Skirkanich Hall basement room 013)

Zoom link
Meeting ID: 925 0325 6013
Passcode: 801060

Following the event, a limited number of box lunches will be available for in-person attendees. If you would like a box lunch, please RSVP here by Monday, June 12 so we can get an accurate headcount.

Speaker: Kevin B. Johnson, MD, MS, FAAP, FAMIA, FACMI
David L. Cohen University Professor
Annenberg School for Communication, Bioengineering, Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, Computer and Information Science, Pediatrics
VP for Applied Informatics (UPHS), University of Pennsylvania

Title: “A White Neighbor, a Black Surgeon, and a Mormon Computer Scientist Walk into a Bar…”

Abstract: As we recognize Juneteenth, a holiday that brings awareness to what journalist Corey Mitchell calls “…a complex understanding of the nation’s past”, we also need to understand how many of our neighbors, staff, and faculty—even those born in the last 100 years—continue to navigate through the environment that made Juneteenth remarkable. Dr. Johnson will share a bit of his personal story and how this story informs his national service and passion for teaching.

Bio: Dr. Johnson is a leader of medical information technologies to improve patient care and safety. He is well regarded and widely known for pioneering discoveries in clinical informatics, leading to advances in data acquisition, medication management, and information aggregation in medical settings.

He is a board-certified pediatrician who has aligned the powers of medicine, engineering and technology to improve the health of individuals and communities. In work that bridges biomedical informatics, bioengineering and computer science, he has championed the development and implementation of clinical information systems and artificial intelligence to drive medical research. He has encouraged the effective use of technology at the bedside, and he has empowered patients to use new tools that help them to understand how medications and supplements may affect their health. He is interested in using advanced technologies such as smart devices and in developing computer-based documentation systems for the point of care. He also is an emerging champion of the use of digital media to enhance science communication, with a successful feature-length documentary describing health information exchange, a podcast (Informatics in the Round) and most recently, a children’s book series aimed at STEM education featuring scientists underrepresented in healthcare.

Dr. Johnson holds joint appointments in the Department of Computer and Information Science of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and secondary appointments in Bioengineering and the Annenberg School for Communication. He serves as Vice President for Applied Informatics in the University of Pennsylvania Health System and as a Professor of Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Before arriving at Penn, he served as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where he had taught since 2002. As Senior Vice President for Health Information Technology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, he led the development of clinical systems that enabled doctors to make better treatment and care decisions for individual patients, and introduced new systems to integrate artificial intelligence into patient care workflows.

The author of more than 150 publications, Dr. Johnson has held numerous leadership positions in the American Medical Informatics Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. He leads the American Board of Pediatrics Informatics Advisory Committee, directs the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Library of Medicine, and is a member of the NIH Council of Councils. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, American College of Medical Informatics and Academic Pediatric Society. He has received awards from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and American Academy of Pediatrics, among many others.

June 8, 2023

Penn Bioengineering Graduate Ella Atsavapranee Wins 2023 Fulbright Grant

Twenty-nine University of Pennsylvania students, recent graduates, and alumni have been offered Fulbright U.S. Student Program grants for the 2023-24 academic year, including eight seniors who graduated May 15.

They will conduct research, pursue graduate degrees, or teach English in Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, France, Germany, Guatemala, India, Israel, Latvia, Mexico, Nepal, New Zealand, the West Bank-Palestine territories, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Thailand.

The Fulbright Program is the United States government’s flagship international educational exchange program, awarding grants to fund as long as 12 months of international experience.

Most of the Penn recipients applied for the Fulbright with support from the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships.

Among the Penn Fulbright grant recipients for 2023-24 is Ella Atsavapranee, from Cabin John, Maryland, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from the School of Engineering and Applied Science and a minor in chemistry from the College. She was offered a Fulbright to conduct research at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

At Penn, Atsavapranee worked with Michael Mitchell, J. Peter and Geri Skirkanich Assistant Professor in Bioengineering, engineering lipid nanoparticles to deliver proteases that inhibit cancer cell proliferation. She has also worked with Shan Wang, Leland T. Edwards Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, using bioinformatics to discover blood biomarkers for cancer detection. To achieve more equitable health care, she worked with Lisa Shieh, Clinical Professor in Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine, to evaluate an AI model that predicts risk of hospital readmission and study how room placement affects patient experience.

Outside of research, Atsavapranee spread awareness of ethical issues in health care and technology as editor-in-chief of the Penn Bioethics Journal and a teaching assistant for Engineering Ethics (EAS 2030). She was also a Research Peer Advisor for the Penn Center for Undergraduate Research & Fellowships (CURF), a student ambassador for the Office of Admissions, and a volunteer for Service Link, Puentes de Salud, and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She plans to pursue a career as a physician-scientist to develop and translate technologies that are more affordable and accessible to underserved populations.

Read the full list of Penn Fulbright grant recipients for 2023-24 in Penn Today.

May 31, 2023May 30, 2023

Why is Machine Learning Trending in Medical Research but not in Our Doctor’s Offices?

by Melissa Pappas

Illustration of a robot in a white room with medical equipment. Machine learning (ML) programs computers to learn the way we do – through the continual assessment of data and identification of patterns based on past outcomes. ML can quickly pick out trends in big datasets, operate with little to no human interaction and improve its predictions over time. Due to these abilities, it is rapidly finding its way into medical research.

People with breast cancer may soon be diagnosed through ML faster than through a biopsy. Those suffering from depression might be able to predict mood changes through smart phone recordings of daily activities such as the time they wake up and amount of time they spend exercising. ML may also help paralyzed people regain autonomy using prosthetics controlled by patterns identified in brain scan data. ML research promises these and many other possibilities to help people lead healthier lives.

But while the number of ML studies grow, the actual use of it in doctors’ offices has not expanded much past simple functions such as converting voice to text for notetaking.

The limitations lie in medical research’s small sample sizes and unique datasets. This small data makes it hard for machines to identify meaningful patterns. The more data, the more accuracy in ML diagnoses and predictions. For many diagnostic uses, massive numbers of subjects in the thousands would be needed, but most studies use smaller numbers in the dozens of subjects.

But there are ways to find significant results from small datasets if you know how to manipulate the numbers. Running statistical tests over and over again with different subsets of your data can indicate significance in a dataset that in reality may be just random outliers.

This tactic, known as P-hacking or feature hacking in ML, leads to the creation of predictive models that are too limited to be useful in the real world. What looks good on paper doesn’t translate to a doctor’s ability to diagnose or treat us.

These statistical mistakes, oftentimes done unknowingly, can lead to dangerous conclusions.

To help scientists avoid these mistakes and push ML applications forward, Konrad Kording, Nathan Francis Mossell University Professor with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering and Computer and Information Science in Penn Engineering and the Department of Neuroscience at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, is leading an aspect of a large, NIH-funded program known as CENTER – Creating an Educational Nexus for Training in Experimental Rigor. Kording will lead Penn’s cohort by creating the Community for Rigor which will provide open-access resources on conducting sound science. Members of this inclusive scientific community will be able to engage with ML simulations and discussion-based courses.

“The reason for the lack of ML in real-world scenarios is due to statistical misuse rather than the limitations of the tool itself,” says Kording. “If a study publishes a claim that seems too good to be true, it usually is, and many times we can track that back to their use of statistics.”

Such studies that make their way into peer-reviewed journals contribute to misinformation and mistrust in science and are more common than one might expect.

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

May 22, 2023May 19, 2023

Safe and Sound: Sonura Supports Newborn Development by Sequestering Disruptive Noise

by Nathi Magubane

Recipients of the 2023 President’s Innovation Prize, team Sonura, five bioengineering graduates from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, have created a device that filters out disruptive environmental noises for infants in neonatal intensive care units. Their beanie offers protection and fosters parental connection to newborns while also supporting their development.

Machines beeping and whirring in a rhythmic chorus, the droning hum of medical equipment, and the bustles of busy health care providers are the familiar sounds of an extended stay at a hospital. This cacophony can create a sense of urgency for medical professionals as they move about with focused determination, closely monitoring their patients, but for infants in neonatal intensive care units (NICU) this constant noise can be overwhelming and developmentally detrimental.

Enter Tifara Boyce, from New York City; Gabriela Cano, from Lawrenceville, New Jersey; Gabriella Daltoso, from Boise, Idaho; Sophie Ishiwari, from Chicago, and Caroline Magro, from Alexandria, Virginia, bioengineering graduates from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, who have created the Sonura Beanie. Their device filters out harmful noises for NICU infants while supporting cognitive and socioemotional development by allowing parents to send voice messages to their newborns.

The Sonura team members are recipients of the 2023 President’s Innovation Prize, which includes an award of $100,000 and an additional $50,000 living stipend per team member. The recent graduates will spend the year developing their product.

“The Penn engineers behind Sonura are determined to make a difference in the world,” says President Liz Magill. “They identified a substantial medical challenge that affects many parents and their newborn children. With the guidance of their mentors, they are taking key steps to address it and in doing so are improving the developmental prospects for children in the NICU. I am proud the University is able to support their important work.”

The Sonura Beanie’s creation began in the Stephenson Foundation Educational Laboratory and Bio-MakerSpace as a part of the Bioengineering Senior Design class project.

Prototype of the Sonura Beanie. (Image: Courtesy of the Sonura team)

She was particularly struck by the noisiness of the environment and considered the neurodevelopmental outcomes that may arise following long-term exposure to the harsh sounds at a critical developmental stage for infants. This concern prompted Magro to consult her team about potential solutions.

“I was really eager to tackle this problem because it bears some personal significance to me,” says Cano, who works on the device’s mobile application. “My sister was a NICU baby who was two months premature, so, when Caroline and I started talking about the issues a disruptive environment could cause, it seemed like the pieces of a puzzle started to come together.”

Read the full story in Penn Today.

May 12, 2023May 16, 2023

Penn Medicine and Independence Blue Cross Eliminate Preapprovals for Imaging Tests

Brian Litt, Professor in Bioengineering in Penn Engineering and in Neurology in the Perelman School of Medicine, spoke to Neurology Today about the advances in technology for detecting and forecasting seizures.

The Litt Lab for Translational Neuroengineering translates neuroengineering research directly into patient care, focusing on epilepsy and a variety of research initiatives and clinical applications.

“Dr. Litt’s group is working with one of a number of startups developing ‘dry’ electrode headsets for home EEG monitoring. ‘They are still experimental, but they’re getting better, and I’m really optimistic about the possibilities there.'”

Read “How Detecting, Identifying and Forecasting Seizures Has Evolved” in Neurology Today.

Read more stories featuring Litt in the BE Blog.

February 16, 2023

Targeted Prenatal Therapy for Mothers and Their Babies Addresses Longstanding Gap in Health Equity

by Melissa Pappas

The research team from left to right includes Kelsey Swingle, Hannah Safford, Alex Hamilton, Ajay Thatte, Hannah Geisler, and Mike Mitchell.

New research on reproductive health demonstrates the first successful delivery of mRNA to placental cells to treat pre-eclampsia at its root.

Pre-eclampsia is a leading cause of stillbirths and prematurity worldwide, occurring in 3 – 8 % of pregnancies. A disorder characterized by high maternal blood pressure, it results from insufficient vasodilation in the placenta, restricting blood flow from the mother to the fetus.

Currently, a health-care plan for someone with pre-eclampsia involves diet and movement changes, frequent monitoring, blood pressure management, and sometimes early delivery of the baby. These standards of care address symptoms of the condition, not the root cause, and further perpetuate health inequity.

Now, Penn engineers are addressing this longstanding gap in reproductive health care with targeted RNA therapy.

The COVID vaccines demonstrated how lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) efficiently deliver mRNA to target cells. The success of LNPs is opening doors for a variety of RNA therapies aiming to treat the root causes of illness and disease. However, drug development and health care have consistently neglected a portion of the population in need of targeted care the most – pregnant people and their babies.

Targeted Treatment for Pre-eclampsia. Current treatment: Early delivery. Results in high maternal blood pressure, restricted blood flow to the fetus. New treatment: Targeted RNA therapy and blood pressure monitoring. Strategically designed Lipid Nanoparticles deliver mRNA to placental cells. Vascular endothelial growth factor expands blood vessels, restores blood flow. In one of the first studies of its kind, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Michael Mitchell, J. Peter and Geri Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in Bioengineering, and Kelsey Swingle, Ph.D. student in the Mitchell Lab and lead author, describe their development of an LNP with the ability to target and deliver mRNA to trophoblasts, endothelial cells, and immune cells in the placenta.

Once these cells receive the mRNA, they create vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a protein that helps expand the blood vessels in the placenta to reduce the mother’s blood pressure and restore adequate circulation to the fetus. The researchers’ successful trials in mice may lead to promising treatments for pre-eclampsia in humans.

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.