Join us for a special Monday Seminar with Dr. Maggie Billingsley, MIT Postdoctoral Associate and University of Virginia BME Faculty Candidate.
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🧬 UVA Biomedical Engineering Seminar Series
Featured Speaker: Margaret Billingsley, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Associate, MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
đź“… Event Details
- Date: Monday, November 10th
- Location: Claude Moore Medical Education Building, Learning Studio, MEB Room 1110
- Time: 1:45 PM – 3:30 PM
- 1:45 PM – Refreshments
- 2:00 PM – Presentation
- 3:00 PM – Meet the Speaker
🧠SEMINAR: "Developing Nanoparticle Platforms for Cancer Immunotherapy"
Cancer is responsible for 20% of deaths in the United States each year, with incidence rates continuing to climb. Thus, new cancer therapies are needed to improve patient outcomes for this growing population. Though cancer immunotherapies—including autologous T cell therapies, cancer vaccines, and checkpoint blockades—have emerged with great promise in treating a variety of cancers, their broad implementation remains limited by high costs, inadequate efficacy, and safety concerns. In this work, nanoparticle platforms are explored as a strategy to overcome the limitations of cancer immunotherapies. As nanoparticles are able to alter pharmacokinetics and biodistribution, they can be leveraged to provide targeted, safer therapies with enhanced efficacy. This work explores the development of two nanoparticle platforms for the improvement of cancer immunotherapies. First, ionizable lipid nanoparticles are optimized to engineer T cell therapies for leukemia using mRNA in vivo, demonstrating a safer, lower cost strategy than traditional T cell manufacturing. Secondly, polymer-lipid nanoparticles are designed for the delivery of therapeutic cytokines to drive immune cell infiltration in the ovarian cancer tumor microenvironment, illustrating the importance of controlled release for therapeutic efficacy. In all, this work emphasizes the potential of nanoparticle platforms to enhance current interventions, facilitate the development of novel immunotherapies, and improve outcomes for patients receiving these treatments. Future work will continue to explore the rational design of nanoparticle platforms for immunotherapies with a focus on novel formulations, nanoparticle surface modifications, and characterization of cell-nanoparticle interactions in sex-specific disease to generate translatable platforms in women’s health applications.
👨‍🔬 About the Speaker
Dr. Maggie Billingsley is a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Stay tuned for her bio!