The American Institute of Chemical Engineers recently highlighted our research on the cover of AIChE Journal and in a feature in Chemical Engineering Processes magazine.

Our work aims to understand how nanoparticles penetrate and transport through biological tissues so that we can better design and innovate drug delivery strategies. To accomplish this task, we developed a new class of biomimetic materials known as polymer-linked emulsions which replicate both the structure and mechanics of soft tissues. A team of graduate and undergraduate students – Daniel Keane, Colby Constantine, and Matthew Mellor – then conducted optical tracking measurements in these materials to demonstrate that we sufficiently replicate biologically relevant transport properties. Future work will establish correlations between the in vitro transport observed in polymer-linked emulsions and in vivo transport observed in animal models to (1) better understand the mechanisms underlying nanoparticle transport, and (2) predict performance of drug delivery vectors.