Cell Manufacturing and Immunomodulatory Biomaterials for Vascularized, Muscle Tissue Engineering

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

2:30 PM-4:00 PM

BIOMED Seminar

Title:
Cell Manufacturing and Immunomodulatory Biomaterials for Vascularized, Muscle Tissue Engineering
    
Speaker:
Brian Kwee, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Ammon Pinizzotto Biopharmaceutical Innovation Center
University of Delaware

Details:
Skeletal muscle tissue engineering therapies offer a means to treat a variety of different muscle related diseases and trauma, including volumetric muscle loss, muscle dystrophy, critical limb ischemia. These therapies include cell-based tissue engineering approaches that combine muscle cells and supporting cells (i.e., endothelial cells that form blood vessels) with biomaterial scaffolds to form new vascularized skeletal muscle tissue outside the body for subsequent implantation. Furthermore, cytokines and growth factors can be combined with drug delivery biomaterials to stimulate host cells to regenerate via in situ tissue engineering.

This presentation will focus on our work to develop cell-manufacturing and immunoengineering approaches to enhance the efficacy of vascularized skeletal muscle tissue engineering therapies. For cell manufacturing, we are developing novel approaches to sort and manipulate heterogeneous populations of cells with varying potency to form tissues in biomaterial scaffolds. On the immunoengineering side, we are engineering drug-delivery biomaterials that can control the number and types of adaptive immune cells at sites of muscle injury to promote pro-regenerative inflammatory microenvironments.  

Biosketch:
Brian Kwee, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Delaware (UD). His lab focuses on developing cell manufacturing and immunoengineering approaches to enhance the efficacy of vascularized, skeletal muscle tissue engineering technologies. Before joining UD, Dr. Kwee received his PhD in Engineering Sciences with David Mooney at Harvard SEAS, where he worked on immunomodulatory biomaterials that regulate T-cells for tissue regeneration. He then went on to do a postdoc at the US FDA at the Center of Biologics Evaluation and Research with Kyung Sung, focused on cell manufacturing approaches for cell-biomaterial combination therapies.

Dr. Kwee's work has recently been recognized by an Outstanding Early Career Researcher Award at the 2024 Immune Modulation and Engineering Symposium. He is also an active member of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society, and Society for Biomaterials.

Contact Information

Carolyn Riley
cr63@drexel.edu