Seminars

Thursday, November 9th, 3:30-5:00pm

LOCATION: BME Seminar Room

BIO: Dr. Kevin McHugh is an Assistant Professor and CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research in the Department of Bioengineering at Rice University whose work has been featured in journals including Science, Science Translational Materials, Advanced Materials, and PNAS. Dr. McHugh received his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 2009 and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University in 2014 where his Ph.D. work focused on developing tissue engineering scaffolds for dry age-related macular degeneration. He then joined Dr. Robert Langer’s Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow where he developed vaccine delivery systems with an emphasis on applications in low-resource environments. At Rice, Dr. McHugh’s lab combines customized biodegradable materials and cutting-edge fabrication techniques to create novel drug delivery systems that overcome the limitations of current drug and vaccine formulations.

ABSTRACT: 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. However, despite their enormous health benefits, drug utility is limited by sub-optimal efficacy, side effects, low patient adherence, and accessibility issues. This seminar will describe the development of two drug delivery platforms—one based on a self-assembled peptide hydrogel and another based on microfabricated polymeric particles. These systems are capable of modulating the timing and location of drug release via different mechanisms, which can be optimized for the disease of interest. In the first system, self-assembled peptides functionalized to engage in dynamic covalent bonding are shown to prolong small-molecule and protein therapeutic release, thereby improving pharmacokinetic profiles and drug efficacy while reducing toxicity. In the second system, microparticles with core-shell structures are shown to exhibit pulsatile drug release after a delay that can be tuned from hours to months. Then, by combining different particle populations, full dosing regimens can be administered in a single injection. This approach is particularly promising for the development of single-injection vaccines that can improve access to immunization in low-resource settings.