Nanotechnology Seminars & Webcasts

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Materials Chemistry Seminar

Patrick S. Stayton
Department of Bioengineering
University of Washington

“Smart Biohybrid Materials That Talk and Listen in Nanospace”

Friday, November 14, 2008
1:30 – 2:30 p.m.

WTHR 201

“Smart” materials can reversibly change their structural and physical-chemical properties in response to environmental signals. Our group has been interested in developing biohybrid materials that bring together “smart” polymers and biomolecules for biotechnology applications. The physical transitions of the synthetic polymer can be triggered reversibly by small changes in pH, temperature, or light, and we use the coil transitions to “talk” to the corresponding biological components.
In a first example, we have been interested in opening the intracellular target universe to biologic drugs. This intracellular delivery barrier has severely limited the druggable target space in the pharmaceutical field. We have developed a new family of polymeric carriers that reversibly display membrane-destabilizing activity in response to small pH changes, and mimic the intracellular transport enhancing activity of viruses and pathogens. Recent advances in the polymer chemistry field have also enabled an unprecedented degree of control over carrier properties and especially the specificity and efficiency of bioconjugation chemistry. The biologic carriers are potentially applicable to a wide range of biotherapeutics, and might open up new families of peptide, antibody or nucleic acid drug candidates that attack previously inaccessible intracellular targets.

In a second example, we have developed new stimuli-responsive polymer-protein conjugates for performing diagnostic sample processing and assays in lab-on-a-chip microfluidic cards. These systems are being developed for global health applications that run diagnostic panels for infectious diseases in resource-poor distributed settings.

The 2008 Physiological Sensing Symposium

Sponsors: Brick Nanotechnology Center, Bindley Bioscience Center, and Physiological Sensing Facility

"Multiscale Integration of Nanotechnology,

BioMEMS and Biology"

with Raoul Kopelman, Ph.D, University of Michigan, as the keynote speaker

Thursday, November 20, 2008

8:30am – 3:30pm

Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship -- Room 121

Registration Requested: http://www.purdue.edu/dp/bioscience/BBCEvent.php or Call 494-2276

Today the advancements in science and engineering are now so profound in pace and impact, that they are propelling the emergence of entirely new fields. These new fields are highly interdisciplinary, in terms of the broad integration across all realms of basic science and applications driven engineering. Examples of these new disciplines include the rapidly evolving fields of bioMEMS and nanotechnology. BioMEMS are based on microelectronics, microfabrication and micromachining technologies as an enabling technology for biological systems. Nanotechnology involves engineering nanometer-sized features, and for biological applications there is potential in terms of cell-tissue engineering, and more broadly as pharmaceuticals. Together bioMEMS and nanotechnology offer systems to integrate and interface biological systems across different scalar domains, and are commonly cited as new platforms for advanced new medical diagnostics and therapies. We seek to explore the greater promise of these emerging new approaches as new technologies to study and understand cell biology and bionanosciences. The potential for dramatically expanding our scientific foundations and functionally increasing throughput in terms of research productivity are worth considering. This symposium will introduce various topics related to the integration of nanotechnology, and bioMEMS with biological systems as new platforms for scientific discovery.

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