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Full-Text Articles in Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering
Shape Memory Alloy Capsule Micropump For Drug Delivery Applications, Youssef Mohamed Kotb
Shape Memory Alloy Capsule Micropump For Drug Delivery Applications, Youssef Mohamed Kotb
Theses and Dissertations
Implantable drug delivery devices have many benefits over traditional drug administration techniques and have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. By delivering the medication directly to the tissue, they enable the use of larger localized concentrations, enhancing the efficacy of the treatment. Passive-release drug delivery systems, one of the various ways to provide medication, are great inventions. However, they cannot dispense the medication on demand since they are nonprogrammable. Therefore, active actuators are more advantageous in delivery applications. Smart material actuators, however, have greatly increased in popularity for manufacturing wearable and implantable micropumps due to their high energy …
Phase-Changing Nanodroplets As Nanotheranostic Platform For Combination Cancer Therapy, Catalina-Paula Spatarelu
Phase-Changing Nanodroplets As Nanotheranostic Platform For Combination Cancer Therapy, Catalina-Paula Spatarelu
Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations
Cancer is a cluster of diseases, and 1.8 million Americans are newly diagnosed each year. Treatment issues such as drug instability, the occurrence of severe side effects, as well as resistance make the need for solutions to improve conventional methods, like chemotherapy, apparent. Nano-sized drug-delivery platforms, particles loaded with therapeutic molecules that escape the immune system clearance and accumulate at the tumor site, were proposed as one of these solutions. Despite the expansion of the field, several aspects still need to be addressed: inconsistent delivery of the drugs, inability of measuring the effective dose being delivered to the tumor, lack …
Immunomodulatory Biomaterials For Cancer Immunotherapy, Larry Donnell Stokes Jr
Immunomodulatory Biomaterials For Cancer Immunotherapy, Larry Donnell Stokes Jr
Honors Theses
Cancer immunotherapy has become an effective treatment in the toolbox of oncologists. Immunotherapy offers a less toxic alternative to standard cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and can have prolonged curative effects to decrease cancer recurrence. Today, many drugs and biological agents have been developed that target the immune system and elicit an antitumor/cancer response. These agents are known collectively as cancer immunotherapies. While immunotherapies have radically improved treatment outcomes for many cancer patients, there are drawbacks to using these treatments. Immunotherapy treatments have poor clinical responses in patients with tumors that lack immunogenicity. Some of the treatments also pose a …
Elucidating Mechanisms Of Metastasis With Implantable Biomaterial Niches, Ryan Adam Carpenter
Elucidating Mechanisms Of Metastasis With Implantable Biomaterial Niches, Ryan Adam Carpenter
Doctoral Dissertations
Metastasis is the leading cause of cancer related deaths, yet it remains the most poorly understood aspect of tumor biology. This can be attributed to the lack of relevant experimental models that can recapitulate the complex and lengthy progression of metastatic relapse observed in patients. Mouse models have been widely used to study cancer, however they are critically limited to study metastasis. Most models generate aggressive metastases in the lung without the use of unique cell lines or specialized injection techniques. This limits the ability to study disseminated tumor cells (DTCs) in other relevant metastasis prone tissues. Prolonged observation of …
Artificial Synthetic Scaffolds For Tissue Engineering Application Emphasizing The Role Of Biophysical Cues, Samerender Nagam Hanumantharao
Artificial Synthetic Scaffolds For Tissue Engineering Application Emphasizing The Role Of Biophysical Cues, Samerender Nagam Hanumantharao
Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports
The mechanotransduction of cells is the intrinsic ability of cells to convert the mechanical signals provided by the surrounding matrix and other cells into biochemical signals that affect several distinct processes such as tumorigenesis, wound healing, and organ formation. The use of biomaterials as an artificial scaffold for cell attachment, differentiation and proliferation provides a tool to modulate and understand the mechanotransduction pathways, develop better in vitro models and clinical remedies. The effect of topographical cues and stiffness was investigated in fibroblasts using polycaprolactone (PCL)- Polyaniline (PANI) based scaffolds that were fabricated using a self-assembly method and electrospinning. Through this …
Towards The Rational Design And Application Of Polymers For Gene Therapy: Internalization And Intracellular Fate, Landon Alexander Mott
Towards The Rational Design And Application Of Polymers For Gene Therapy: Internalization And Intracellular Fate, Landon Alexander Mott
Theses and Dissertations--Chemical and Materials Engineering
Gene therapy is an approach for the treatment of acquired cancers, infectious disease, degenerative disease, and inherited genetic indications. Developments in the fields of immunotherapies and CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing are revitalizing the efforts to move gene therapy to the forefront of modern medicine. However, slow progress and poor clinical outcomes have plagued the field due to regulatory and safety concerns associated with the flagship delivery vector, the recombinant virus. Immunogenicity and poor transduction in certain cell types severely limits the utility of viruses as a delivery agent of nucleic acids. As a result, significant efforts are being made to develop …
Bioengineered Platforms To Study Carcinoma Cell Response To Drug Treatment, Thuy V. Nguyen
Bioengineered Platforms To Study Carcinoma Cell Response To Drug Treatment, Thuy V. Nguyen
Doctoral Dissertations
The tumor extracellular matrix (ECM) plays an important role in facilitating tumor growth and mediating tumor cells' resistance to drugs. However, during drug development, potential chemotherapeutics are screened in plastic plates, which lack relevant ECM physicochemical cues. In order to improve drug development process, this dissertation includes the development of relevant 2D and 3D biomaterial systems that can be used to study carcinoma cell response to drug treatment. A novel poly(ethylene glycol)-phosphorylcholine (PEG-PC) high-throughput biomaterial platform was developed to study how the ECM mechanochemical properties affect cancer cells' response to drug. The PEG-PC biomaterial is optically transparent, has a mechanical …
Surface-Initiated Polymerizations For The Rapid Sorting Of Rare Cancer Cells, Jacob L. Lilly
Surface-Initiated Polymerizations For The Rapid Sorting Of Rare Cancer Cells, Jacob L. Lilly
Theses and Dissertations--Chemical and Materials Engineering
Cancer metastasis directly accounts for an estimated 90% of all cancer related deaths and is correlated with the presence of malignant cells in systemic circulation. This observed relationship has prompted efforts to develop a fluid biopsy, with the goal of detecting these rare cells in patient peripheral blood as surrogate markers for metastatic disease as a partial replacement or supplement to tissue biopsies. Numerous platforms have been designed, yet these have generally failed to support a reliable fluid biopsy due to poor performance parameters such as low throughput, low purity of enriched antigen positive cells, and insufficiently low detection thresholds …