Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Seminar Series (Virtual): Eric Shusta

Description

Eric Shusta, chair of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will give a talk titled "Antibody Engineering Strategies to Overcome the Blood-Brain Barrier" as part of the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Seminar Series.

The Zoom meeting ID is 999 7571 3314 and passcode is 442921.

Abstract:

Millions of people worldwide are afflicted with neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, brain cancer, and cerebral AIDS. Although many new drugs are being developed to combat these and other brain diseases, few new treatments have made it to the clinic. The impermeable nature of the brain vasculature, also known as the blood-brain barrier (BBB), is at least partially responsible for the paucity of new brain therapeutics. As examples, approximately 98% of small molecule pharmaceuticals do not enter the brain after intravenous administration, and the BBB prevents nearly all protein and gene medicines from entering the brain. Our research group is therefore focused on developing tools for the analysis of the brain drug delivery process and on identifying novel strategies for circumventing this transport barrier. This presentation will detail our recent efforts to overcome BBB restrictions on brain drug delivery. To this end, we have mined large antibody libraries to identify antibodies that can target the intact and disrupted BBB. After conjugation to drug payloads that can include small molecules, proteins, or DNA therapeutics, these antibodies could have the potential to deliver medicines across the BBB and into the central nervous system for the treatment of brain disease.