BIOE Seminar Series: ECM Scaffold Immune Microenvironment Facilitates Cancer Protection

Friday, September 10, 2021
9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.
Virtual
Gregg Duncan
gaduncan@umd.edu

*Note: meeting login information for virtual seminars will be distributed via email a few days in advance of the event. If you do not receive seminar emails and wish to join the list, email BIOE Public Relations Specialist Emily Rosenthal (erosent1@umd.edu).

The Extracellular Matrix Scaffold Immune Microenvironment Facilitates Cancer Protection

Abstract

The immune system has multifaceted roles in maintaining tissue health that go beyond protection from microbial infection. Wound healing is one of these roles and involves numerous immune cell types to clear debris, initiate angiogenesis, and promote de novo tissue deposition. Functional immunity is also vital for defense against cancer progression and is the primary target of cancer immunotherapy drugs. These two roles overlap during cancer treatment, where surgery is used to treat over 90% of non-metastatic solid tumors, generating tissue deficits that require repair. Regenerative medicine employs biomaterial scaffolds in these instances to modulate the local immune environment and encourage tissue restoration post-resection. Extracellular matrix (ECM) scaffolds prepared by tissue decellularization are frequently implanted for soft tissue repair, however, the full impact of a regenerative biomaterial immune response on cancer immune surveillance is not known. An ideal immunomodulatory scaffold would facilitate defect repair while simultaneously enabling protective anti-tumor immunity. The objectives of this study were to (1) determine the feasibility of leveraging the ECM scaffold immune response as an adjuvant to stimulate long-lasting protective tumor immunity with checkpoint immunotherapy and (2) elucidate the immune mediators of ECM scaffold/cancer interactions. Combining regenerative medicine approaches with cancer immunotherapy may inform strategies to treat a clinically challenging cancer patient population.

About the Speaker, Matthew T. Wolf, Ph.D.

Dr. Matthew Wolf earned his doctoral degree in Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh, Swanson School of Engineering under Dr. Stephen F. Badylak where he developed biologic scaffolds for muscle tissue engineering. His postdoctoral training was conducted in Dr. Jennifer Elisseeff’s lab at Johns Hopkins University within the Translational Tissue Engineering Center (TTEC) and the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy where he studied the immunological determinants of biomaterial-tumor interactions. During this time, he was awarded the Hartwell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016) and was recipient of the Regenerative Medicine Workshop Young Investigator Postdoctoral Award (2019). He was appointed as a Research Associate in Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering in 2019. Dr. Wolf joined the National Cancer Institute as an Earl Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigator in August, 2020 where he studies immunomodulatory biomaterials to augment cancer immunotherapy.


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