On Wed 9/20/17 eight CBEE students involved with the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) had breakfast to get to know each other and to learn more about the department and CWIT.
A follow-on “reduction to practice,” or implementation, challenge will ask participants to submit publication-quality data showing they can build functional human retina tissue.
The team’s idea is to build a retina by screen printing adult
neural progenitor-derived retinal neurons in layers that mimic the
structure of the human retina. The system is scalable and efficient
which should enable the high reproducibility and increased throughput
necessary for drug testing.
The first few weeks of life are critical for premature and low birth weight babies, as their ability to regulate their own body temperature is not fully developed. Placing the baby in an incubator, essentially a man-made version of the womb, helps maintain an infant’s temperature and environment. However, the use of incubators in low-resource countries is much more difficult, as the products are generally too expensive.
“The statistics, especially in lower source environments, are pretty grim: About every 10 seconds a baby dies, and usually it’s due to problems of hypothermia or sepsis,” says Govind Rao, Ph.D., professor and director at the Center for Advanced Sensor Technology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). “Low birth weight has become increasingly common as women defer childbirth. If you had an inexpensive way to intervene and keep baby warm, it would have a dramatic impact.” Rao added that premature babies born in these environments are also at risk of infection, because the incubators are not always effectively cleaned and sanitized. This means that as one sick baby leaves the incubator, the next baby coming in is highly susceptible to accepting the infection. “That becomes a highly problematic issue leading to high mortality,” says Rao.
Govind Rao and his team of students at UMBC have been committed to improving the odds for preemies and low-birth rate babies in low-resource environments. What started as a class project evolved into the development of a low-cost and disposable cardboard incubator designed to prevent neonatal mortality as a result of preterm birth and/or infection. Rao assigned the students in his sensors class a research project to develop a design for a low-cost incubator that would maintain the baby’s temperature and use as many locally available resources as possible. After the student teams came up with their designs, they took a field trip to India, visiting rural healthcare centers to find out what happens on the front lines.
Read the full article in MedTech Intelligence.
This award is given annually to recognize an environmental engineering or science professor who is making outstanding contributions to the teaching of environmental engineering, both at the individual's home institution and beyond. A cash award of $500 is presented to the recipient. Previous winners are ineligible for this award.
This award recognizes excellence in classroom performance and related activities. Specifically, nomination packages should demonstrate that the nominee:
Although open to nomination at any rank, the award is intended primarily to recognize a demonstrated commitment to teaching early in a person's career. Therefore, preference is usually given to nominees who are at the assistant or associate level and have demonstrated excellence in teaching undergraduate courses.
]]>As a Washington Post article highlighted, some doctors are now using immunotherapy—stimulating the body’s own immune response to tackle disease in targeted ways—to treat cancer patients who are not responding to traditional chemotherapies, and increasingly in place of chemotherapies or in combination with them. The Food and Drug Administration recently received unanimous recommendation from an advisory committee that a new class of immunotherapy, a “living drug,” be approved for use in children and young adults with leukemia. “The treatment takes cells from a patient’s body, modifies the genes, and then infuses those modified cells back into the person who has cancer,” explains NPR.
The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation awarded UMBC’s Greg Szeto, assistant professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering, a $75,000 research fellow grant to continue his work on immunotherapy. Specifically, Szeto is developing experimental tests and computational models that could help physicians more accurately predict how individual patients with multiple myeloma will respond to a similar type of immunotherapy. Szeto’s preliminary work with collaborator Ivan Borrello, associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, correctly predicted clinical outcome in more than 80% of multiple myeloma patients from a prior immunotherapy clinical trial using “living drugs.”
“A major hurdle for the field is determining who will benefit from which immunotherapies, and making that determination as early as possible,” explains Szeto. “Though a long way off, the rewards of pursuing such research are key insights for better understanding how existing and emerging therapies work, enhancing the connections between STEM disciplines, and in the long run increasing patient quality of life and the ability of doctors and patients to make informed care decisions.”
In previous research, Szeto found that combining multiple immunotherapy agents can improve responses in mice treated for melanoma, and computational models could help predict and dissect these responses. A paper he coauthored with collaborators including Michael Zhang Ph.D. ’23, chemical engineering, who worked with Szeto as a research tech at MIT, appeared in Nature Medicine last year and indicated that combinations of immunotherapy agents can enable immune cells to more effectively infiltrate and reduce the size of the tumor. This size reduction was predicted by fusing experimental tests with computational models. Currently, Szeto is working to define when and how to test different samples to get the best predictive models.
Because treatments are tailored to individual patients based on a broad range of factors, understanding and assessing their function can be incredibly complex, and it can be challenging to replicate successful treatments across patients. Szeto hopes to help researchers develop more predictable treatment regimens that can use knowledge about individual patients, but with a firmer sense of when particular schedules of medication and dosage levels should be used, and what impact they are likely to have.
“There really hasn’t been any approval for this ‘living drug’ approach before, so what recently happened is a major milestone,” he says, adding that “it paves the way for approval of other drugs within this class, similar to those we are studying with Dr. Borrello.”
Image: Greg Szeto. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.