Event
Bioengineering Seminar Series: Joel Schneider
Friday, March 18, 2011
11:00 a.m.
Room 1200 Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building
Professor Gregory Payne
gpayne@umd.edu
De Novo Design of Self-Assembled Peptide Hydrogels for Delivery: Manipulating Peptide Structure to Modulate Material Properties
Joel Schneider
Head, Peptide Design and Materials Section
National Cancer Institute
Hydrogel materials are finding use for the encapsulation and delivery of small molecules, proteins and cells. We have designed a class of peptide-based hydrogels that enable the direct three-dimensional encapsulation of therapeutic. Loaded gels exhibit shear-thinning/self-healing properties enabling their delivery via syringe. Hydrogels are prepared from peptides that have been designed to undergo an environmentally triggered intramolecular folding event that leads to the formation of a beta-hairpin conformer. This conformer rapidly self-assembles into a physically crosslinked network of beta-sheet rich fibrils. By linking self-assembly to triggered peptide folding, hydrogelation can be controlled with temporal resolution. When peptide folding is triggered in the presence of a therapeutic, direct encapsulation results. Structural changes to the peptide monomer directly translate to changes in bulk material properties. Thus, peptide design can be used to tune material properties. Macromolecule as well as cell encapsulation and delivery will be discussed. In addition, some of these hydrogels, although cytocompatible towards mammalian cells, display inherent antibacterial activity.
