Event
Bioengineering Distinguished Guest Seminar: Lonnie Shea
Friday, September 11, 2015
9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.
Pepco Room (1105), Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building
Dr. Christopher Jewell
cmjewell@umd.edu
Lonnie Shea
Professor and William & Valerie Hall Chair
Biomedical Engineering
University of Michigan
Systems Tissue Engineering
Systems and strategies for promoting tissue growth provide enabling technologies for either enhancing regeneration for diseased or injured tissues, or to investigate abnormal tissue formation such as cancer. Given the complexity inherent in tissues, my laboratory is working towards the concept of "Systems Tissue Engineering", which indicates the dual need i) to develop systems capable of presenting combinations of factors that drive tissue growth, as well as ii) to incorporate systems biology approaches that can identify the appropriate combination of factors. Biomaterial scaffolds represent a central component of many approaches and provide the enabling tools for creating an environment and/or deliver factors that can direct cellular processes toward tissue formation. We have developed scaffolds with the objective of providing factors to stimulate growth and also blocking factors that inhibit regeneration, and will illustrate this approach through our work with islet transplantation in Type 1 Diabetes therapy and scaffolds for the early detection of cancer. The immune response has become a central focus, and will present results for local immunomodulation around the scaffold, as well as the development of nanoparticles for modulating the immune response, in order to induce tolerance in autoimmune disease and allogeneic cell transplantation.
The ability to present multiple factors raises the challenge of identifying the combination that will maximally promote tissue formation. Toward this goal, we have developed a cellular array for the large scale profiling of transcription factor activity throughout tissue formation, which we propose can identify the factors necessary to drive cells towards the desired phenotype. This array represents a novel systems biology tool for molecularly dissecting tissue formation. This approach of relating tissue development to molecular design of the scaffold may ultimately lead to the formation of engineered tissues that could provide alternatives to whole organ or tissue transplantation.
About the Speaker
Lonnie D. Shea is a professor and chair in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan, with a joint appointment in the Department of Chemical Engineering. He received his BS and MS degrees at Case Western Reserve University in Chemical Engineering. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering and Scientific Computing while working with Jennifer Linderman at the University of Michigan and was a postdoctoral fellow with David Mooney in the Department of Biologic and Materials Science in the Dental School at the University of Michigan. He joined the faculty of Northwestern University in 1999 within the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and retains an appointment in that department as well as in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Feinberg School of Medicine.
He joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 2014 bringing his active research group working at the interface of tissue engineering, gene therapy, and drug delivery. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2000, which helped start the work on developing new technologies based on combining biomaterials and gene/drug delivery. The overall objective is to create controllable microenvironments for directing or molecularly dissecting tissue growth. These systems are being applied to clinical problems such as ovarian follicle maturation for treating infertility, islet transplantation for diabetes therapies, nerve regeneration for treating paralysis. More recently, he research has moved into cancer diagnostics, autoimmune disease, and systems biology applied to regenerative medicine. His lab consists of approximately 20 graduate students/postdoctoral fellows who work closely with basic science and clinical collaborators throughout the medical school. Dr. Shea has received funding from NIH, NSF, and multiple foundations, received the Clemson Award for Contributions to the Literature in 2015, and published in excess of 170 manuscripts on his research. In addition to his teaching and research commitments, he was director of the NIH Biotechnology Training Grant at Northwestern University. Dr. Shea is a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, and is a member of the editorial boards for Molecular Therapy, Biotechnology and Bioengineering, and Drug Delivery and Translational Research.
