BME Seminar Series

Dr. Simone Douglas-Green: "Characterizing and Manipulating Biological Interactions: From Proteolytic Remodeling to Protein Corona of Nanoparticles"

The Department of Biomedical Engineering cordially invites you to attend the next BME Seminar Series, which will be held in hybrid mode, on Wednesday, December 8^th at 9:30am. The in-person meeting will take place at the Medical Campus in DRI 1000. The address is Diabetes Research Institute, Room 1000, 1450 NW 10th Avenue, Miami, FL-33136.

About The Speaker

Simone Douglas-Green received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Miami in 2015, and her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the joint program at Georgia Tech and Emory University in 2020. During graduate school, she received numerous awards and honors including an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, BME Teaching Assistant of the Year, and the BME Graduate Outstanding Teaching/Mentoring Award. Simone is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT in Dr. Paula Hammond’s lab and was recently awarded a 2021 NASEM Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her postdoctoral research focuses on designing charged cartilage-targeting nanocarriers to treat osteoarthritis. She has an interest in studying protein adsorption on nanocarriers (protein corona) to leverage and manipulate the physiochemical properties of nanocarriers for optimal therapeutic potential.

Abstract

Proteins hardly work individually. As part of complex biological systems and networks, various types of proteins are involved in regulatory and metabolic activities, including signaling cascades in response to biochemical or biomechanical stimuli. More specifically, proteases facilitate tissue remodeling in pathophysiological as well as reparative physiological processes. Although proteases are commonly studied in clinical diseases, challenges in tissue engineering have led us to identify and explore novel extracellular functions that can help enhance design strategies to improve the function and longevity of tissue-engineered constructs. Protein interactions also occur on the surface of nanoparticles, forming nanoparticle-protein complexes or a protein corona. These interactions affect nanoparticle targeting and transport properties. Despite advancements in the field, there has been difficulty with clinical translation of nanoparticle technology, and researchers suggest it is partly due to a lack of knowledge about “bio-nano interfaces”. This has motivated my current postdoctoral research which aims to expand techniques to characterize the protein corona on nanoparticles to systematically understand how nanoparticle-protein interactions affect their delivery properties. The goal is to improve targeting and therapeutic efficacy of nanoparticles by engineering the bio-nano interface. The first part of this seminar will discuss my Ph.D. work which focused on characterizing cleavage and degradation of fibrin(ogen) —a major blood clotting protein and biomaterial scaffold—by cysteine cathepsins, a special class of proteases that have applications in tissue engineering and pathophysiology. This will be followed by an introduction to my postdoctoral research on understanding and manipulating the protein corona on cartilage-targeting nanocarriers. Finally, I will summarize how skills acquired in my Ph.D. and postdoc converge to the independent research I aim to pursue: leveraging physiological properties of nanoparticles to target biomarkers for disease detection and therapeutic interventions.