CBE Fall Seminar Series Speaker: Nicole Steinmetz - University of California, San Diego

Description

NanoEngineering gone #viral: plant virus-based therapeutics

Nanoscale engineering is revolutionizing the way we detect, prevent and treat diseases. Virusesare playing a special role in these developments becausethey can functionas prefabricated nanoparticles. We utilize and build-upon the high-precision assemblies of the viral capsids and utilize them as platform technologies, engineered and repurposed for a desired function. More specifically, we turned toward plant viruses as a platform nanotechnology. We have developed a library of plant virus-based nanoparticles and through structure-function studieswe are beginning to understand how to tailor these materials appropriately for applications targeting human, veterinary and plant health. Through chemical biology, we have developedvirus-based delivery systems carryingmedically relevant cargo enabling tissue-specific imaging and treatment. A particular exciting avenue is the development of plant virus-like particleplatforms for cancer immunotherapy. The idea pursued is an ‘in situ vaccination’ to stimulate local and systemic anti-tumor immune responses to treat established disease, and most importantly to induce immune memory to protect patients from outgrowth of metastasis and recurrence of the disease.Another avenue is the repurposing of plant viruses to enable plant health; we employ principles of nanomedicine to target pesticides residing deep in the soil therefore challenging to reach using contemporary pesticides. I will highlightengineering design principles employed to synthesize the next-generation nanotherapeutics using plant virus-based platform technologies, and I will discussthe evaluation of such in preclinical mouse models and canine patients as well as in the agricultural arena.

Dr. Steinmetz is a Professor and Vice Chair of NanoEngineering at the University of California, San Diego (2018-present). She is the founding Director of the Center for Nano-ImmunoEngineering (nanoIE), the Co-Director for the Center for Engineering in Cancer within the Institute for Engineering in Medicine, and she serves on the Leadership Team for a UC San Diego Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), an $18M NSF-funded research center. She started her independent career at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in the Department of Biomedical Engineering (in 2010-2018), where she was promoted through the ranks of Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor. Dr. Steinmetz trained at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA where she was a NIH K99/R00 awardee and AHA post-doctoral fellow (2007-2010); she obtained her PhD in Bionanotechnology from the University of East Anglia where she prepared her dissertation as a Marie Curie Early Stage Training Fellow at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK (2004-2007). Her early training was at the RWTH-Aachen University in Germany.