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BE Seminar: “Engineering therapeutic immunity using (nano)biomaterials” (Natalie Artzi, Harvard Medical School)
March 30, 2023 at 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
This seminar will be held in person only; snacks will be provided.
Immunomodulatory therapies have advanced to clinical trials over the past decade for the treatment of a range of diseases and disorders, from cancer to diabetes to transplant rejection. However, the efficacy of these therapies remains limited, as challenges associated with off-target drug toxicity, poorly controlled drug pharmacokinetics, and an incomplete understanding of real-time therapy responses prevent effective therapeutic windows from being realized. Here, I will highlight some of our work on the design, fabrication, and characterization of biomaterial-based delivery technologies for the controlled delivery of combination immunotherapies and for the non-invasive monitoring of their associated immune responses for cancer therapy. We show that the design of materials and their delivery context can influence therapeutic outcomes and alter the spatiotemporal characteristics of the incited immunomodulatory responses. By adroitly designing and utilizing our material delivery platforms, we can deliver immunotherapies with tailorable pharmacokinetics and enhanced efficiency to improve long-term therapeutic outcomes and tolerability and enable studying basic questions in immunobiology as we seek to generate a ‘living’ therapeutics.
Natalie Artzi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Principal Research Scientist, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, MIT; Associate Faculty, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering; Associate Member, the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
Dr. Artzi is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is a Principal Research Scientist at MIT, Associate Faculty at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. She completed her postdoctoral studies at MIT studying tissue: biomaterial interactions and designing smart biomaterials for therapy and diagnosis.
In her role as a researcher, Dr. Artzi is dedicated to advancing personalized medicine through the integration of science, engineering, and medicine. She serves as a scientific advisor to the Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation and is an associate editor at ACS Nano. In an effort to promote diversity and inclusion in her lab, she provides training opportunities to students at all levels and has established exchange programs and raised funds to ensure that students of all backgrounds and socio-economic statuses can participate in her research.
Dr. Artzi’s work has earned her numerous grants and awards, including the Kabiller Rising Star Award in Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine, the One Brave Idea award, the Controlled Release Society Young Investigator Award, Mid-Career Award from the Society for Biomaterials, Bright Futures Prize, and the Massachusetts Life Science Center for women entrepreneurs. She co-founded the startup company BioDevek, which is dedicated to improving outcomes following internal surgeries through the development of next-generation biomaterials.
Her research focuses on enhancing the understanding of tissue-biomaterial interactions and improving the delivery of therapies to target tissues and cells. Her lab has developed non-viral delivery systems and engineered injectable materials that gel rapidly and adhere to the target site, allowing for localized and sustained delivery of therapies. This work has the potential to transform treatment outcomes and expand the window in which therapies are safe and effective, making more therapies available to patients, including next-generation gene therapies. Particularly for hard-to-treat diseases with significant biological barriers to delivery such as in brain cancer, Artzi’s approach shows great promise (TEDx MIT talk).