Speaker: Dr. Kevin McHugh (Departments of Bioengineering and Chemistry, Rice University)

Time: 09:30 a.m., July 1, 2024, GMT+8

Venue: Academic Hall, 14th Floor, Peking University Medical Science and Technology Building

Abstract: 

Drugs have revolutionized modern healthcare, reducing mortality and morbidity across a vast array of diseases. As a result, more than half of the world's population takes at least one medication each day. Similarly, vaccines are among the most effective and cost-effective biomedical interventions, saving more than 150 million lives over the past 50 years. Yet, despite their enormous health benefits, drug and vaccine utility is limited by sub-optimal efficacy, side effects, patient adherence, and accessibility issues. This seminar will describe the development of biomaterial delivery platforms that improve drug and vaccine efficacy or accessibility using chemistry and advanced manufacturing techniques. In the first half of this seminar, I will describe our drug delivery platform based on self-assembled peptides functionalized to engage in dynamic covalent bonding with boronic acid-containing molecules, which can greatly extend the release of small-molecule, peptide, and protein therapeutics. A single injection of this flexible platform can be used to deliver a small-molecule drug to suppress a TB infection better than repeated oral dosing, serve as a basal insulin dose that corrects hyperglycemia for 6 days, release a small-molecule cancer drug locally for at least 3 weeks, or release an antibody over two months. Then, in the second half of this talk, I will describe our efforts to vaccine potency and accessibility by employing biomaterial systems that mimic the timing of antigen exposure in standard multi-injection vaccination schedules, elicit an improved immune response through lymph node-targeting, and serve as molecular adjuvants that outperform alum.

Source: Peking University School of Pharmaceutical Sciences