Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/30/2024
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
Communicore, C1-15
Drugs have revolutionized modern healthcare, reducing mortality and morbidity across a vast array of diseases. As a result, more than half of the world’s population takes at least one medication each day. Similarly, vaccines are among the most effective and cost-effective biomedical interventions, saving more than 150 million lives over the past 50 years. Yet, despite their enormous health benefits, drug and vaccine utility is limited by sub-optimal efficacy, side effects, patient adherence, and accessibility issues. This seminar will describe the development of biomaterial delivery platforms that improve drug and vaccine efficacy or accessibility using chemistry and advanced manufacturing techniques. In the first half of this seminar, I will describe our drug delivery platform based on self-assembled peptides functionalized to engage in dynamic covalent bonding with boronic acid-containing molecules, which can greatly extend the release of small-molecule, peptide, and protein therapeutics. A single injection of this flexible platform can be used to deliver a small-molecule drug to suppress a TB infection better than repeated oral dosing, serve as a basal insulin dose that corrects hyperglycemia for 6 days, release a small-molecule cancer drug locally for at least 3 weeks, or release an antibody over two months. Then, in the second half of this talk, I will describe our efforts to vaccine potency and accessibility by employing biomaterial systems that mimic the timing of antigen exposure in standard multi-injection vaccination schedules, elicit an improved immune response through lymph node-targeting, and serve as molecular adjuvants that outperform alum.
Bio: Dr. Kevin McHugh is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering and CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research at Rice University whose work has been featured in Science, Advanced Materials, Science Translational Materials, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Nano Today, and ACS Nano. Dr. McHugh received his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 2009, where he worked with Dr. James M. Anderson to evaluate the biocompatibility of novel polymers. He then received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University in 2012 and 2014, where his Ph.D. work under Dr. Magali Saint-Geniez focused on developing tissue engineering scaffolds for retinal diseases. He then joined Dr. Robert Langer’s laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow and developed vaccine delivery systems with an emphasis on applications in low-resource environments. Since joining Rice in 2019, Dr. McHugh has led a lab focusing on the development of biomaterial systems with applications in drug delivery, vaccination, and regenerative medicine. In particular, his lab’s systems often leverage cutting-edge fabrication techniques and bespoke biodegradable materials to create injectable systems that improve drug and vaccine safety, efficacy, and accessibility. This work has attracted support from a number of sources, including the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Defense, Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, private foundations, and start-up companies.