Engineering Better Medicines from our Own Cells | Krystyn Van Vliet | TEDxMIT скачать в хорошем качестве

Engineering Better Medicines from our Own Cells | Krystyn Van Vliet | TEDxMIT

Cell therapy is one of the key medicines of the future, where living cells are delivered to the body as the medicine. Those cells can be the perfect drug factory when delivered inside the body, but we have to manufacture enough of those cells outside the body first. The future has already started, but these are early days of discovery and challenges for making the cells that could cure cancer, speed healing after brain injury, and help our bodies repair our own aging body parts. Tomorrow, cell therapy will include several types of stem cells, progenitor cells, and function-committed cells. Some will require cells to go from one donor to another patient. Some will have the donor and the patient be the same person, by first handling and “fixing” the cells outside the body. Some will be modified genetically to introduce new functions, whether by CRISPR or other approaches we have not imagined yet. The challenge lies in how to make – how to manufacture – these living biological cells as a uniform, reliable, safe, and fast-to-make-and-deliver product. That takes new technology, new engineering, and new understanding of how cells interact with the outside world of the materials around them as one cell becomes two, two become four, and so on. We are on the cusp of harnessing new ways to make cell therapy a possible cure available to many patients for many diseases. To do that, we have to measure the quality of the cell product (easy for aspirin, hard for cells) without changing the cells, ideally without touching the cells, and for all the cells that we deliver to the patient. That is a biological engineering challenge, and we are up to it! Professor Van Vliet's group studies material chemomechanics: material behavior at the interface of mechanics, chemistry, physics, and biology. She focuses on thermodynamically metastable surfaces and interfaces, in which stress-assisted chemical reaction kinetics are notoriously difficult to analyze via either experiment or simulation. The mechanisms of this coupling in cell-material interactions are incompletely understood, due to both biological complexity and lack of appropriate experimental and computational tools, but are key to design of materials that modulate cell adhesion for drug uptake and differentiation. Her long-term goal is to predict and modulate key functions of biological cells by drawing analogies to the coupled chemical/mechanical behavior of structurally simpler, nonbiological material interfaces and nanocomposites. These integrated experimental and computational efforts include three main thrusts: (1) chemomechanical mapping of nanocomposite surfaces including living cells; (2) mechanics of amorphous and viscoelastic surfaces and nanostructures; and (3) chemical kinetics in mechanically strained, nanoscale material interfaces. Her group has used this interdisciplinary application of mechanical and chemical forces to rapidly map environment-structure-property relations in engineered materials, and to predict the binding kinetics of individual molecules on living cells. These studies have shown that the stiffness of materials to which molecular ligands are tethered can directly affect kinetics of ligand-receptor interactions at cell surfaces. Professor Van Vliet serves as the faculty supervisor of the DMSE Nanomechanical Technology Laboratory, has co-developed new undergraduate core classes, and has implemented new programs to retain underrepresented minority students. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx