Prof. Pankaj Karande's Talk

Jan 12, 2018 - 16:00

Jan 12, 2018 - 17:00

Room No. 240 first floor Chem. Engg. dept

Seminars

Prof. Pankaj Karande RPI USA

Abstract: It is often necessary to breach biological barriers during therapeutic interventions in diseases for delivering drugs to organs or across tissues. Similarly it is often necessary to rebuild barriers that have lost function or are compromised by disease or injury. In this talk I will discuss two research directions in my group related to breaching and building biological tissues. The first focuses on overcoming the blood brain barrier (BBB) for delivery of drugs and drug cargoes to the central nervous system. Brain is the most protected and privileged organ and crossing the BBB has been a long-standing challenge in the treatment of brain disorders. We are exploiting natural transport pathways available to serum constituents for crossing the BBB. I will specifically discuss the design and discovery of peptides that bind to one such protein claudin-5 as a way of chaperoning drugs from the systemic circulation into the brain. The second focuses on the use of a novel fabrication technique called free form fabrication to build biological tissues from their constituent cells and matrices. We have developed an on-demand 3D printing platform to build a functional and viable vascularized human skin in a layer-by-layer fashion. Our preliminary studies demonstrate that this approach can reproduce many biological and morphological features of human skin. I will present results on the use of printed human skin as engineered grafts for regenerative medicine and as efficacy models for assessing inflammatory or immunological responses of topical agents on skin.Bio: Prof. Karande joined the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2008. Before joining Rensselaer Prof. Karande was a postdoctoral scholar in the Chemical Engineering Department and Center for Cancer Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He obtained his Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara in 2006 where his thesis work focused on the use of chemical enhancers for transdermal drug delivery. Prof. Karande’s research has been recognized by The Edison Award for best Product in Science and Medicine (2009) The Anna Fuller Fellowship in Molecular Oncology (2006-2007) Outstanding Pharmaceutical Paper by the Controlled Release Society (2005) and the Fionna Goodchild Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Mentoring (2004). Prof. Karande is an inventor on several patents in the area of Transdermal Formulation Discovery and Novel High Throughput Screening Platforms. He has served as scientific advisor to fqubed Inc. (now part of Nuvo research) and currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of CureBiotech Inc. His current research interests include 3D Biofabrication of organs and tissues drug delivery formulations and bioseparations.