1,090 results match your criteria: "Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience[Affiliation]"

The lymphatic system plays complex, often contradictory, roles in many cancers, including melanoma; these roles include contributions to tumor cell metastasis and immunosuppression in the tumor microenvironment as well as generation of antitumor immunity. Advancing our understanding of lymphatic vessel involvement in regulating tumor growth and immune response may provide new therapeutic targets or treatment plans to enhance the efficacy of existing therapies. We utilized a syngeneic murine melanoma model in which we surgically disrupted the lymphatic vessel network draining from the tumor to the tumor-draining lymph node (TDLN) while leaving the TDLN intact.

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High throughput cell stiffness measurement via multiplexed impedance sensors.

Biosens Bioelectron

January 2025

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States; The Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States; Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States. Electronic address:

Since physiological and pathological events change the mechanical properties of cells, tools that rapidly quantify such changes at the single-cell level can advance the utility of cell mechanics as a label-free biomarker. We demonstrate the capability to probe the population-level elastic modulus and fluidity of MDA-MB-231 cells at a throughput of up to 50 cell/second within a portable microchip. Our sensing scheme adapts a code multiplexing scheme to implement a distributed network of sensors throughout the microchip, thereby compressing all sensing events into a single electrical output.

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Understanding the Lymphatic System: Tissue-on-Chip Modeling.

Annu Rev Biomed Eng

January 2025

1Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, Chapel Hill and Raleigh, North Carolina, USA;

The lymphatic vasculature plays critical roles in maintaining fluid homeostasis, transporting lipid, and facilitating immune surveillance. A growing body of work has identified lymphatic dysfunction as contributing to the severity of myriad diseases and to systemic inflammation, as well as modulating drug responses. Here, we review efforts to reconstruct lymphatic vessels in vitro toward establishing humanized, functional models to advance understanding of lymphatic biology and pathophysiology.

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Anterior cervical spine surgeries are often complicated by difficulty swallowing due to local postoperative swelling, pain, scarring, and tissue dysfunction. These postoperative events lead to systemic steroid and narcotic use. Local, sustained drug delivery may address these problems, but current materials are unsafe for tight surgical spaces due to high biomaterial swelling, especially upon degradation.

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Neurons as Immunomodulators: From Rapid Neural Activity to Prolonged Regulation of Cytokines and Microglia.

Annu Rev Biomed Eng

January 2025

2Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA; email:

Regulation of the brain's neuroimmune system is central to development, normal function, and disease. Neuronal communication to microglia, the primary immune cells of the brain, is well known to involve purinergic signaling mediated via ATP secretion and the cytokine fractalkine. Recent evidence shows that neurons release multiple cytokines beyond fractalkine, yet these are less studied and poorly understood.

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Enzyme stability can be measured in a number of ways, including melting temperature, activity retention, and size analysis. However, these measurements are often conducted in an idealized storage buffer and not in the relevant enzymatic reaction media. Particularly for reactions that occur in alkaline, volatile, and high ionic strength media, typical analyses using differential scanning calorimetry, light scattering, and sodium dodecyl-sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis are not satisfactory to track the stability of these enzymes.

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Microengineered in vitro CAR T cell screens and assays.

Cell Syst

December 2024

George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA; Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA; Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA; Winship Cancer Institute, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. Electronic address:

Established and emergent microengineered in vitro systems enable the evaluation of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell product purity, avidity, and functionality. Here, we describe such systems and how they have been used to optimize CAR T cell products by selecting highly viable cells, eliminating off-target cells, and tailoring avidity to balance efficacy and safety. The future of CAR T cell therapy development and manufacturing is expected to be anchored in a cyclical process that integrates multiple high-throughput and patient-centered techniques for identifying, enriching, and evaluating T cell subtypes.

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Agunmu (ground herbal medicine) is a form of West African traditional medicine consisting of a cocktail of herbs. The goal of this study is to evaluate a formulation of Agunmu made from , , , , and , sold in the open market and commonly used for the treatment of malaria by the locals, for its antimalarial effects and to determine the active principles that may contribute to the antimalarial effect. The ethanolic extract obtained from this formulation (Ag-Iba) was analyzed, using TLC, LC-MS, and Tandem-MS techniques, to determine its phytochemical properties.

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TAM receptors mediate the Fpr2-driven pain resolution and fibrinolysis after nerve injury.

Acta Neuropathol

December 2024

Centre for Interdisciplinary Pain Medicine, Department of Anaesthesiology, Intensive Care, Emergency and Pain Medicine, University Hospital Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.

Nerve injury causes neuropathic pain and multilevel nerve barrier disruption. Nerve barriers consist of perineurial, endothelial and myelin barriers. So far, it is unclear whether resealing nerve barriers fosters pain resolution and recovery.

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Herein, a detailed investigation of nanodrugs derived by combining a chemotherapy (chemo) and photothermal therapy (PTT) approaches to enhance chemo drug efficacy is presented. Tamoxifen and its metabolite; N-desmethyltamoxifen are the selected chemo drugs that were electrostatically attached with a PTT agent, NaIR820, via a metathesis approach to develop two different ionic material (IM)-based chemo-PTT drugs. Ionic nanomaterials (INMs) were synthesized using reprecipitation method, and these carrier- free nanoparticles were characterized in detail.

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Article Synopsis
  • Aging leads to an increase in diseases due to the development of senescent cells that stop dividing and contribute to altered immune responses.
  • The senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) aims to recruit immune cells to clear damaged cells, but it can inadvertently cause surrounding cells to also become senescent, leading to chronic inflammation known as "inflammaging."
  • An interdisciplinary approach combining biomaterials, microfluidics, and spatial omics is proposed to better understand the aging process and its effects on diseases, highlighting the importance of cellular interactions in tissue environments.
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In May and June of 2021, marine microbial samples were collected for DNA sequencing in East Sound, WA, USA every 4 hours for 22 days. This high temporal resolution sampling effort captured the last 3 days of a Rhizosolenia sp. bloom, the initiation and complete bloom cycle of Chaetoceros socialis (8 days), and the following bacterial bloom (2 days).

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Effects of Release of TSG-6 from Heparin Hydrogels on Supraspinatus Muscle Regeneration.

Tissue Eng Part A

November 2024

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Muscle degeneration after rotator cuff tendon tear is a significant clinical problem. In these experiments, we developed a poly(ethylene glycol)-based injectable granular hydrogel containing two heparin derivatives (fully sulfated [Hep] and fully desulfated [Hep-]) as well as a matrix metalloproteinase-sensitive peptide to promote sustained release of tumor necrosis factor-stimulated gene 6 (TSG-6) over 14+ days in a rat model of rotator cuff muscle injury. The hydrogel formulations demonstrated similar release profiles , thus facilitating comparisons between delivery from heparin derivatives on the level of tissue repair in two different areas of muscle (near the myotendious junction [MTJ] and in the muscle belly [MB]) that have been shown previously to have differing responses to rotator cuff tendon injury.

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Article Synopsis
  • Current bulk molecular assays miss important details about how cancer cells signal, making it hard to understand drug resistance, so a new technique called GSR-PPI was developed to analyze these interactions at a single-cell level with advanced imaging and deep learning.
  • The study utilized an experimental method that involved tagging proteins and imaging them in EGFR mutant cancer cells after drug treatment, generating high-resolution images and applying deep learning models to interpret the data.
  • GSR-PPI showed superior performance over traditional methods by accurately classifying drug responses and detecting specific protein interactions, ultimately providing better insights into cancer signaling and potential therapies.
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Purpose: A theoretical framework based on coherent reflection and filter theory predicts that the phase-gradient delays of stimulus frequency otoacoustic emissions (SFOAEs) are correlated with tuning sharpness in the mammalian cochlea. In this paper, we use a computational model of the cochlea to test this theory and to evaluate how SFOAE phase-gradient delays may be used to estimate the sharpness of cochlear tuning.

Methods: This study is based on a physiologically motivated model which has been previously shown to predict key aspects of cochlear micromechanics.

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Balancing Brightness and Photobasicity: Modulating Excited-State Proton Transfer Pathways in Push-Pull Fluorophores for Biological Two-Photon Imaging.

J Phys Chem A

November 2024

School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Georgia Institute of Technology, 901 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, United States.

Article Synopsis
  • Push-pull fluorophores with donor-π-acceptor structures are useful for two-photon microscopy, enhancing brightness through charge-delocalization in excited states.
  • The study focused on the fluorescent probe chromis-1, revealing that its pH-dependent emission is influenced by intramolecular proton transfer rather than direct deprotonation of water.
  • A modification of the pyridine nitrogen's position in the fluorophore significantly reduced its excited-state basicity, emphasizing the need for careful design in fluorescent probes to limit pH-induced variations in response.
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Synthetic hydrogel substrate for human induced pluripotent stem cell definitive endoderm differentiation.

Biomaterials

April 2025

Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA; Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. Electronic address:

Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) can give rise to multiple lineages derived from three germ layers, endoderm, mesoderm and ectoderm. Definitive endoderm (DE) cell types and tissues have great potential for regenerative medicine applications. Current hiPSC differentiation protocols focus on the addition of soluble factors; however, extracellular matrix properties are known to also play a role in dictating cell fate.

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Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is a powerful technique for spatially resolved analysis of metabolites and other biomolecules within biological titissues. However, the inherent low spatial resolution of MSI often limits its ability to provide detailed cellular-level information. To address this limitation, we propose a guided super-resolution (GSR) approach that leverages high-resolution Imaging Mass Cytometry (IMC) images to enhance the spatial resolution of low-resolution MSI data.

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Therapeutic Immunomodulation of Tumor-Lymphatic Crosstalk via Intratumoral Immunotherapy.

Mol Pharm

December 2024

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, United States of America.

Intra- and peritumoral lymphatics and tumor-draining lymph nodes play major roles in mediating the adaptive immune response to cancer immunotherapy. Despite this, current paradigms of clinical cancer management seldom seek to therapeutically modulate tumor-lymphatic immune crosstalk. This review explores recent developments that set the stage for how this regulatory axis can be therapeutically manipulated, with a particular emphasis on tumor-localized immunomodulation.

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Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) regulate signalling pathways and cell phenotypes, and the visualization of spatially resolved dynamics of PPIs would thus shed light on the activation and crosstalk of signalling networks. Here we report a method that leverages a sequential proximity ligation assay for the multiplexed profiling of PPIs with up to 47 proteins involved in multisignalling crosstalk pathways. We applied the method, followed by conventional immunofluorescence, to cell cultures and tissues of non-small-cell lung cancers with a mutated epidermal growth-factor receptor to determine the co-localization of PPIs in subcellular volumes and to reconstruct changes in the subcellular distributions of PPIs in response to perturbations by the tyrosine kinase inhibitor osimertinib.

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Ovariectomy drives increase of an ECM transcription signature in the posterior eye and retina.

Vision Res

December 2024

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States; Department of Ophthalmology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States; Center for Visual and Neurocognitive Rehabilitation, Joseph Maxwell Cleland Atlanta VA Medical Center, Atlanta, GA, United States. Electronic address:

Increased risk of developing glaucoma has recently been associated with early age of menopause. Here, we examined how age and surgically-induced menopause via ovariectomy (OVX) impacted gene expression in gene pathways previously linked to glaucoma, such as extracellular matrix (ECM) remodeling and TGF-β signaling. Using bulk RNA sequencing, we analyzed changes in young (3-4 months) and middle-aged (9-10 months) Long-Evans rats.

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Biomaterials for Cell Manufacturing.

ACS Macro Lett

November 2024

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Tech/Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, United States.

Article Synopsis
  • Cell therapies use engineered cell populations to treat diseases, and biomaterials can enhance their manufacturing for better clinical applications.
  • Key goals in this approach include scaling up production, controlling cell behavior (phenotype), and selecting the most effective cells for therapy.
  • Advancements in biomaterial design could lead to improved methods for isolating and selecting the most therapeutically relevant cells from larger batches.
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Tauopathies are neurodegenerative diseases that involve tau misfolding and aggregation in the brain. These diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), are some of the least understood and most difficult to treat neurodegenerative disorders. Antibodies and antibody fragments that target tau oligomers, which are especially toxic forms of tau, are promising options for immunotherapies and diagnostic tools for tauopathies.

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