SBME Seminar with Dr. Alexander Prossnitz – Engineering drug delivery technologies to define, design, and deliver solutions to global health challenges

Meeting ID: 94251 212203

Password: 212203

Location: DMCBH 101 Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health Building, 2215 Wesbrook Mall

Over the past two decades, commercial drug products have rapidly evolved to encompass a diverse range of biopharmaceuticals presenting new challenges and opportunities for global health. While these biologics offer unparalleled target specificity and increased potency, their complex chemical structures create significant hurdles to patient administration and access. To address these multifaceted challenges, my work leverages the properties of soft matter to mechanistically define translational barriers and design scalable materials for drug delivery. In this talk, I will discuss our recent efforts to create materials that enhance shelf-stability and reduce the administration burden of biopharmaceuticals and to develop immunoengineering platforms for prophylactic treatment of snakebite envenoming. In particular, I will highlight the importance of integrating fundamental engineering principles into the design of drug formulations and lay the foundation for the next-generation drug delivery technologies to eliminate cold-chain requirements for mRNA vaccine storage, enhance oral delivery of peptides, and tune innate immunity to combat neglected tropical diseases.

Dr. Alexander Prossnitz Biography:

Dr. Alexander Prossnitz is a polymer scientist and bioengineer creating drug delivery technologies to tackle global health challenges. He is currently a Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellow and a Postdoctoral Affiliate of Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Global Health under the advisement of Dr. Eric Appel in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Stanford University. Prior to that, Alex was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow with Dr. Suzie Pun in the Bioengineering Department at the University of Washington, where he designed polymer therapeutics to treat kidney diseases and improve the bioavailability of small molecule drugs. Throughout his career, Alex’s work has applied fundamental principles of soft matter to develop technologies to overcome biological barriers to targeted drug delivery, physical barriers to biopharmaceutical stability, and immunological barriers to vaccines.

Website: https://alexprossnitz.org/

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/alex-prossnitz-8220a0239

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=hGq9CZYAAAAJ&hl=en