Team Science: NIH Funds Development of Nanotherapeutic for Tissue Healing
Article Summary
- Dr. Courtney Dumont is using an NIH R35 grant to develop a nanotherapeutic to help tissue heal.
- Dr. Dumont’s work is an example of the collaborative benefits offered through the Institute for Neural Engineering, a joint venture by The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and the UM Department of Biomedical Engineering.
- Dr. Dumont’s technology controls the body’s delivery of chondroitin sulfate to help restore balance in inflammatory conditions.
Courtney Dumont, Ph.D., assistant professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Miami, recently received a five-year, $1,882,370 National Institutes of Health (NIH) R35 grant to develop and study a nanotherapeutic designed to restore tissue healing by controlling inflammation.
In essence, the therapeutic is designed to reprogram chronic inflammatory states, including those in brain and spinal cord injury, according to W. Dalton Dietrich, Ph.D., scientific director of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and senior associate dean for discovery science at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
Leading-edge Neurosciences Research
Dr. Dumont’s research springs from the Institute for Neural Engineering, The Miami Project’s joint venture with the UM Department of Biomedical Engineering that seeks to answer today’s most pressing neuroscience questions. Suhrud Rajguru, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering at UM, and Dr. Dietrich are co-directors. The health engineering initiative graduated its first class of students, each of whom worked with experts in neuroscience, engineering, computer science or rehabilitation.
“We are thrilled to see how this partnership is continuing to produce strong research and educational synergies between the University’s neuroscience and engineering programs,” said Fabrice Manns, Ph.D., chair of biomedical engineering at UM. “Congratulations, Dr. Dumont and colleagues, on this new funding that will support important studies.”
R35 funding is earmarked for early-career faculty and supports talented, promising investigators. This grant follows Dr. Dumont’s National Science Foundation-funded study on nanotechnology for neural repair.
“The prior grant focuses on the development and refinement of nanoparticles, a nanotechnology that is largely studied for drug and vaccine delivery,” Dr. Dumont said. “That same nanoparticle technology developed by my team will be used in the NIH grant, and we’ll also expand it to a microscale biomaterial. Using both nanoparticles and microparticles in chronic inflammatory conditions, we can explore the role of scale from the nanometer to micrometer on how the body senses these materials. Moreover, we can study the efficacy of these two different scale materials to remove pro-inflammatory signals that perpetuate chronic inflammatory conditions.”
Controlling Inflammation
Inflammation is part of the body’s natural response to injury and disease. However, too much inflammation or persistent chronic inflammation can lead to tissue damage and autoimmune and inflammatory disorders like arthritis.
Robust inflammation after a spinal cord injury can cause worse outcomes. Too much inflammation after certain types of skin wounds may result in nonhealing chronic wounds.
“We have anti-inflammatory drugs to help treat these conditions,” Dr. Dumont said. “The challenge is they don’t work for everybody. They don’t necessarily go where they need to go, and they can have side effects.”
Dr. Dumont’s technology controls the body’s delivery of chondroitin sulfate, a naturally occurring regulator of inflammatory cytokine signaling, to help restore balance in dysregulated inflammatory conditions.
“Ultimately, we’re coming up with a method of resolving inflammation by working with the body,” Dr. Dumont explained, adding that the technology could eventually be part of an everyday first aid kit.
Dr. Dumont and colleagues will study the technology using clinically relevant models for chronic wounds and spinal cord injury.
“We hope to eventually work with The Miami Project and Dr. Phillip Frost Department of Dermatology and Cutaneous Surgery, which are involved in trying to get new anti-inflammatory drugs into trials. If this initial work is successful, we can use the available resources at the University of Miami to push it towards the clinic,” Dr. Dumont said. “The Miller School is one of the few places in the country that has the ability to translate this to humans relatively rapidly.”
Tags: brain injury, clinical trials, Dr. W. Dalton Dietrich III, inflammation, Institute for Neural Engineering, NIH grant, spinal cord injury, The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis