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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Summary Sentence: “Designing Instructive and Responsive Biomaterials: From Stem Cells to Drug Delivery” - Krishnendu Roy, PhD - Georgia Tech
Full Summary: The Petit Institute Breakfast Club seminar series was started with the spirit of the Institute's interdisciplinary mission in mind and started to feature local IBB faculty member's research in a seminar format. Faculty are often asked to speak at other universities and conferences, but rarely present at their home institution, this seminar series is an attempt to close that gap. The IBB Breakfast Club is open to anyone in the bio-community.
Breakfast Club Seminar Series“Designing Instructive and Responsive Biomaterials: From Stem Cells to Drug Delivery”
Krishnendu Roy, PhD
Professor
Distinguished Faculty Fellow
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Tech
The behavior of cells and tissues and that of the whole organism is a unique combination of their genetic makeup and their microenvironment. The ability to effectively transfer genes into humans provides unique possibilities for the treatment of various diseases. Efficient expression of antigenic proteins in-vivo following gene delivery, can “train” our immune system to fight against incurable cancers and deadly infectious diseases. On the other hand rational manipulation of the microenvironment of stem and progenitor cells provides us with the opportunity to precisely control and manipulate their differentiation and develop unique approaches for cell-based therapeutics.
The overall goal of our research endeavor is the development of new biomaterial-based strategies for gene/drug delivery and stem cell engineering. Towards this, my laboratory focuses on three major directions: (a) design and development of novel delivery systems for nucleic-acid based immunotherapy and cancer chemotherapy (b) engineering complex microenvironments to study and manipulate stem cells and understand their behavior in biomimetic, three-dimensional conditions and (c) developing novel engineering tools and high throughput methods to generate functional T cells and Dendritic cells from stem cells.
