Event
BIOE Seminar Series: Manu Platt (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Friday, October 2, 2020
9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.
Virtual
Emily Rosenthal
erosent1@umd.edu
Join us for the Bioengineering Seminar Series, which connects experts from around the country with our faculty, students, and staff to discuss their recent findings. Everyone is welcome!
The Fall 2020 seminars will be held virtually on Fridays from 9:00 a.m. – 9:50 a.m., unless otherwise noted. All BIOE faculty, students, staff, postdocs, and affiliates as well as additional subscribers to our weekly seminars emails will receive Zoom event information the week of each seminar.
If you do not yet receive our weekly seminars email and would like to subscribe to the listserv, or if there is a particular seminar listed below that you would like to attend, please email Emily Rosenthal.
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Dr. Manu Platt
Associate Professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Diversity Director, STC on Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems (EBICS)
Georgia Institute of Technology
Things Fall Apart: Proteolytic Networks in Tissue Destructive Diseases
Hosted by the University of Maryland Bioengineering Graduate Student Society
Dr. Platt’s research centers on proteolytic mechanisms of tissue remodeling during disease progression using both experimental and computational approaches. These diseases of focus are health disparities in the U.S., but global health concerns: pediatric strokes in sickle cell disease, personalized and predictive medicine for breast cancer, and others, which have taken him to South Africa and Ethiopia for collaborative work to find solutions for low resource settings. Cysteine cathepsins are the most potent mammalian collagenases and elastases, but cathepsin pharmacological inhibitors continue to fail human clinical trials, mostly due to unexpected side effects. This suggests there are underlying regulatory behaviors or feedback loops yet to be elucidated. During this seminar, Dr. Platt will discuss 1) experimental and computational tools to better quantify and model protease activity, 2) consequences of their upregulation due to sickle cell disease, and 3) fundamental insights and consequences of the underlying enzymology to improve pharmacological targeting.
