Jiapu Liang, in collaboration with fellow graduate students Robert Accolla, Kaiyuan Jiang, and Ying Li, recently published our findings on the development of a multi-drug releasing porous scaffold. In this approach, drugs were loaded within PDMS microbeads and integrated into our porous scaffold. By loading into beads, enhanced control over drug kinetics was observed, as well as the ability to easily incorporate multiple different drugs. Using complementary agents of dexamethasone (immunosuppressive) and estrogen (proangiogenic), modulated host responses to the implant was observed, where the local release of both agents resulted in a balance of the two signals. The next phase of this work will be to extend this approach to other agents and evaluate their capacity to create an optimal engraftment microenvironment for islet survival and protection.
This paper was also in response to Dr Liang’s 2020 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. Outstanding Student Award.
Congrats to Jiapu and all collaborators!