Understanding 3D Tissue Microenvironment for Developing Precision Therapeutic Delivery

Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/04/2021
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Location
Virtual via Zoom

Mei He, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmaceutics, University of Florida

Virtual via Zoom & projected in Communicore, C1-15

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The human body immune system manipulates immune cells and organs to produce therapeutic solutions for effectively treating an extraordinary variety of diseases, which serves as the most natural and intelligent therapeutic production system. However, replicating such 3D in vivo tissue microenvironment compartmentalized with distinct cellular micro-domains is extremely challenging, due to the complex changes of cell types and extracellular matrix. Our research group discovered 3D bioprinting and microfluidic technology for engineering 3D tissue system with micro-scale precision, which is able to mimic in-vivo like tissue function for secretion of extracellular vesicles and exosomes. Such cellular engineered exosomes carry tailored antigenic markers or combination of stimulating factors for developing precisely controlled therapeutic delivery agents and advancing cancer immunotherapy.

Bio:

Dr. He is an assistant professor from the Department of Pharmaceutics, College of Pharmacy at the University of Florida. She obtained her PhD degree from the University of Alberta and postdoc training from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. He is the Editorial Board member of Pharmaceutics and AAPS Scientific Programming Committee Track Leader, as well as the Advisory Board Member of journal Lab on Chip (LOC). She is also very experienced proposal reviewers serving NIH study sections and other panel reviews for DOD, NSF, and USDA. Her journal review efforts have been recognized as the Outstanding Reviewer twice in 2018 and 2020 from the LOC Royal Society of Chemistry. Dr. He Received NIH Maximizing Investigator’s Research Award for Early Stage Investigators in 2019, and she also received the LOC Emerging Investigator Award in 2019. Her multiple publications received the Most Download Articles of 2016 (LOC), the Featured Cover Story of 2018 (LOC), Technology Readers Choice Award of 2018 (SLAS), and Top 100 Read Articles of 2019 (Scientific Reports from Nature Publishing Group). Her recent publication is appeared in the journal of Nature Biomedical Engineering and highlighted as the Editorial Story. Dr. He’s innovation leads to 16 pending and issued patents, and 8 of them have been licensed by multiple companies and commercialized on the market. Particularly, she founded the startup company Clara Biotech in 2018 for advancing the innovative exosome research.