BME Seminar with Dr. Theresa Raimondo
Abstract
Nanoparticle-directed Immune Modulation
The immune system plays an integral role in health maintenance and disease. When dysregulated, it directly participates in tissue degeneration, and contributes to the pathology of muscular dystrophies and cancer, among many other conditions. My research combines immunology and nanoparticle engineering to understand the role various immune cells play in tissue regeneration and pathology, and to design novel treatments to therapeutically direct the immune response. This presentation will highlight my recent efforts towards these goals, comprising the design of cytokine-gold nanoparticles and RNA-lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), for application in the areas of muscle regeneration following both acute ischemic injury, and chronic pathology (advanced muscular dystrophy); and in cancer progression, in murine models of metastasis.
In the context of muscle regeneration, I will discuss the design of gold nanoparticles used to deliver anti-inflammatory cytokines (IL-4, IL-13, and/or IL-10) throughout the targeted muscle. In a second example, I will discuss the design of RNA-LNPs intended to shift the immune system towards cancer-specific killing. Collectively, these data indicate that cytokine and RNA-delivering nanoparticles are able to modulate key regulators of immune cell activation to promote either functional tissue regeneration or cancer killing.
Bio
Theresa Raimondo is an Assistant Professor of Engineering, with a secondary appointment in the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown University. She earned her PhD in Engineering Sciences – Bioengineering from Harvard University in 2019 under the mentorship of Dr. David Mooney; and received her postdoctoral training with Dr. Daniel Anderson and Dr. Robert Langer at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2019 to 2023. Raimondo has been a recipient of several awards such as a 2023/2024 MIT Faculty Founders prize competition, 2022 Convergence Scholar fellowship from MIT’s Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship, and Harvard’s Smith family graduate fellowship.