BIOE Seminar Series: Molly Shoichet (University of Toronto)

Friday, April 30, 2021
9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.
Virtual
Shawn He
shawnhe@umd.edu

The Spring 2021 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 you would like to attend this particular seminar, please email Emily Rosenthal

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Professor of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry
Associate Chair, Graduate Studies
Canada Research Chair in Tissue Engineering
University of Toronto
 
 
Engineering Healing in the Brain and Eye

We are designing polymer strategies to answer questions in biology and solve problems in medicine. We are investigating models of disease to determine how we can better understand disease progression and how we can stop and reverse that disease instead of merely treating its symptoms. I will share two stories in blindness and stroke where we have taken advantage of innovations in cell and protein therapeutic delivery to promote tissue repair.

In blindness diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration, the photoreceptors and the retinal pigmented epithelium die. In order to stop and reverse blindness, these cells need to be replaced, yet finding a source of these cells is in itself difficult. We found that conventional strategies of transplanting these cells in saline resulted in significant cell death. We designed an injectable hydrogel in which to transplant the cells and observed significantly greater survival and some functional repair [1]. Now we wonder how we can use novel protein affinity-release strategies to deliver proteins [2].

The holy grail of regenerative medicine is stimulation of the stem cells that are already resident in us. Until the early 1990s, we didn’t think that our brains had the capacity to regenerate. We now know that we all have stem cells in our brains. The challenge is to figure out how to stimulate them to promote repair. We designed a composite hydrogel that could be applied directly on the brain in a model of stroke. With the release of two proteins, we demonstrated that these resident stem cells could be stimulated to promote tissue and functional repair [3]. Now we wonder whether we can develop this system to deliver potent enzymes to further promote repair [4].

These stories underline the opportunity of collaborative, multi-disciplinary research at the intersection of chemistry, biology and engineering applied to solving problems in medicine. It is exciting to think what we will discover as this research continues to unfold.

About the Speaker

Professor Molly Shoichet is University Professor, a distinction held by less than 2% of the faculty, at the University of Toronto. She served as Ontario’s first Chief Scientist in 2018 where she worked to enhance the culture of science. Dr. Shoichet has published over 650 papers, patents and abstracts and has given over 420 lectures worldwide. She currently leads a laboratory of 30 and has graduated 220 researchers. Her research is focused on drug and cell delivery strategies in the central nervous system (brain, spinal cord, retina) and 3D hydrogel culture systems to model cancer. Dr. Shoichet co-founded four spin-off companies, is actively engaged in translational research and science outreach. Dr. Shoichet is the recipient of many prestigious distinctions and the only person to be inducted into all three of Canada’s National Academies of Science of the Royal Society of Canada, Engineering and Health Sciences. In 2018, Professor Shoichet was inducted as an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2011, she was awarded the Order of Ontario. Dr. Shoichet was the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Laureate for North America in 2015, elected Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2016, won the Killam Prize in Engineering in 2017, elected to the Royal Society (UK) in 2019 and awarded the NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal in 2020. Dr. Shoichet received her SB from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1987) and her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Polymer Science and Engineering (1992).


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