Event
BIOE Seminar: Bioinspired Ionic Liquids: Leveraging Chemistry to Achieve Targeted Drug Delivery
Friday, October 4, 2024
9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.
A. James Clark Hall, Room #2121
Katharina Maisel
maiselka@umd.edu
Eden Tanner
Assistant Professor
University of Mississippi
Bioinspired Ionic Liquids: Leveraging Chemistry to Achieve Targeted Drug Delivery
Abstract
One of the major challenges facing intravenous nanoparticle administration is off-target accumulation, where the vast majority of nanoparticles do not arrive at their intended destination. Biocompatible ionic liquids (ILs) have been shown to have tunable interactions with biomolecules including proteins and are prone to rearrangement on charged surfaces. We show that this can be exploited to design ionic liquids as polymeric coatings, which can direct the nanoparticle to “hitchhike” onto various blood components in whole blood, which then redirects biodistribution in vivo. This talk will discuss the development of ionic liquids for efficacious nanoparticle drug delivery, elucidate the lessons learnt thus far, describe the many challenges to come, and highlight the opportunities that arise at the intersection of physical chemistry and bioengineering.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Eden Tanner completed her undergraduate degree with Honors in Advanced Science as a Chemistry major at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She earned her doctorate in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Oxford and completed her Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Harvard University working with Samir Mitragotri. As of August 2020, Dr. Tanner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Mississippi. The Tanner Lab works at the interface of Chemistry and Bioengineering to solve outstanding biomedical challenges, with a particular focus on the use of ionic liquids in nanoparticle drug delivery.
