BME Seminar Series: Dr. Jennifer Elisseeff

Tuesday, September 30, 2014
8:30 a.m.

Goergen Hall 101 (Sloan Auditorium)

Materials Design for Probing Biological Mechanisms and Clinical Translation

Jennifer Elisseeff, Ph.D.
Jules Stein Professor
Wilmer Eye Institute and Biomedical Engineering, Translational Tissue Engineering Center
Johns Hopkins University

Abstract: 

Polymer chemistry provides the basic tools to create materials with specific desired properties for biomedical applications.  Biomaterials are employed to create scaffold systems to probe mechanisms of cellular and tissue behavior and for addressing clinical challenges.  Controlled synthetic and biological microenvironments can be created to probe cell behavior.  However, in the case of biomaterials for regenerative medicine, there is a lack of experience in clinical translation and ultimately the mechanisms of action, design criteria and required functional properties of materials.  Examples will be provided of our work in biomaterials development to create scaffold microenvironments for understanding stem cell differentiation and cancer cell behavior along with case studies of clinical translation in orthopedic and soft tissue reconstruction.