Dendritic cells (DCs) are critical mediators between innate and adaptive immunity. DCs present antigen to T cells but the underlying substate determines if the T cell response will be conventional or regulatory. This represents a significant engineering opportunity; by tuning DCs with biomaterials, our lab seeks to develop wide ranging therapies for tolerizing or anti-viral therapies.
This talk will first cover our efforts to generate tolerogenic DCs (tolDCs), which can generate regulatory T cells.
Peter Deak,
Drexel University
The main challenge for tolDC is phenotypic stability: tolDCs are readily reprogrammed by inflammatory environments. To solve this problem, we developed tolDC cell therapies laden with polymer microparticles that provide sustained intracellular release of immunomodulatory drugs. In an orthogonal approach, we are also developing lymph node targeted immunomodulatory liposomes to target lymph node resident DCs. Our other project is focused on DC targeted anti-HIV therapeutic vaccines. One of the main challenges for HIV is its immune escape and rapid mutagenesis. Here, we developed HIV capturing liposomes, we call nanotrap therapeutic vaccines (NTVs), which form complexes with circulating viruses and facilitate uptake by local DCs. This essentially bypasses the mutagenesis problem by vaccinating against the circulating viral strain. With these diverse projects, we highlight the engineering opportunity of targeted DCs with simple but effective biomaterials.
Dr. Peter Deak is an assistant professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering who joined the department in August 2022. He received his BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Dayton (Dayton, OH) and his MS in Chemical Engineering and PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Notre Dame working under Dr. Basar Bilgicer. His PhD work was designing novel diagnostics and therapeutics for food allergies. After his PhD, Dr. Deak worked in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago working under Dr. Aaron Esser-Kahn, investigating novel subpopulations in innate immune cells. At Drexel, his lab works of developing dendritic cell modulating biomaterials and nanoparticles for autoimmunity, transplant and HIV infection.