Elizabeth Nance, Ph.D, Jagjeet and Janice Bindra Endowed Career Development Associate Professor: Closing the Technology Gap for Pediatric Brain Disease
SEMINAR (In-Person + Zoom)
This CBE Seminar will be hosted in person as well as online via Zoom. RSVP to receive the zoom link by emailing info@bioengineering.ucsb.edu.
Zoom will open after the host has joined at the start of each seminar. You can ask questions through the chat forum and by raising your "hand" and the speaker will call on you.
Speaker
Elizabeth Nance, Ph.D.
Jagjeet and Janice Bindra Endowed Career Development Associate Professor & Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Chemical Engineering
University of Washington, Seattle WA
Faculty Host
Arnab Mukherjee
9:00 am in Bldg. ESB Room #1001
Closing the Technology Gap for Pediatric Brain Disease
Abstract
Children comprise roughly 27% of the world’s population, yet pediatric trials make up 17% of the total number of clinical trials registered with the World Health Organization, with only 7% of trials taking place in newborns. Approved adult therapeutics are often used off-label for children, and can take up to 7 years longer to go from the first clinical trial in adults to the first trial in children. These numbers highlight a significant gap in technology development for the neonatal and pediatric populations, particularly technology that focuses on improving therapeutic outcomes for children and newborns with a range of conditions. Our research seeks to develop and evaluate therapeutic delivery systems for newborns and children, whom have unique physiologies compared to adults. We have a specific focus on engineering therapeutics that mitigate or attenuate ongoing injury in the brain, with the goal to improve neurological function and quality of life across the lifespan.
In this talk, we will discuss our use of nanotechnology, neurobiology, and data science tools to characterize changes in brain microenvironments in living brain tissue and evaluate the subsequent impact on nanotherapeutic design and implementation. We will show how nanotherapeutics can leverage transport behavior in the brain to target regions of the brain that contain diseased cells – and uptake in diseased cells – for increased neuroprotection in neonatal and pediatric brain disease. We will close the talk with a perspective for the nanomedicine field that centers around two approaches: creating (1) open-access nanoformulation databases and (2) in vitro to in vivo therapeutic screening pipelines.
BIO
Dr. Elizabeth Nance joined the University of Washington in September 2015, and is currently the Jagjeet and Janice Bindra Career Development Endowed Associate Professor in Chemical Engineering, with adjunct appointments in Radiology, Bioengineering, and the eScience Institute. She also serves as the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies in Chemical Engineering. Elizabeth received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from NC State University, and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering with Dr. Justin Hanes. She then completed a postdoc with Dr. Sujatha Kannan in Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, with a research emphasis in neuroscience, at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Elizabeth is an active collaborator in the neuroscience, neurology, and pediatric fields. In 2019, she received the Presidential Early Career Achievement in Science & Engineering (PECASE) award, and the UW Undergraduate Research Mentor Award, given to 4 faculty across the three UW campuses. She is a recipient of an NIGMS R35 MIRA award and the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award, in addition to receiving funding from NSF, NICHD, DoD, Microsoft Azure, and the Seattle Medical Foundation.
