Controlling Controlled Release to Make Medicine That Imitates Life (INVITED SPEAKER)

This talk will outline tools that can be used to rationally design drug delivery formulations with controllable design parameters that produce a given, desired release behavior. This can be used to generate a desired continuous rate of release over time or even controlled bursts of drug with a predefined period of time in between. As just one example, temporal control over the release of specific growth factors can induce robust formation of specific tissues that naturally regenerate via stage-wise processes. Similarly, this concept can also be used to reproduce spatial information that cells (and even tumors) employ to manipulate immunological responses. Collectively, these new tools can effectively mimic the prose and context of local, cell-driven “communication” and have already shown significant promise as next-generation medical treatments in a variety of disease models where current medical treatments have no answer.