ABSTRACT: Chemical engineers creatively fuse the physical and chemical sciences with biology and mathematics to design processes and products that improve people’s lives. Our research group at the University of British Columbia has interpreted this compelling vision quite literally, and we pass our time applying chemical engineering to address some of the most pressing challenges in health and medicine. My seminar will detail two endeavours that sit at either end of the drug discovery and development pipeline. The first part of the seminar will highlight some of our recent work on the manufacture of a pre-clinical screen for the identification of chemical hits that exhibit activity against neurodegeneration. Alzheimer disease and other neurodegenerative conditions incur high caregiver costs and significantly diminish economic output. Treating them is an urgent priority but there are no treatments. Drug discovery has been stymied by the absence of reliable pre-clinical screens. There is a clear requirement to develop better pre-clinical screens to test lead compounds in a brain-specific context. To this end, we are developing a process to manufacture engineered brain tissue whose microenvironment closely mimics the environment within degenerated brains. Our work combines concepts and insights from stem cell bioengineering, tissue biomanufacturing, and biomedical instrumentation. The manufactured tissue incorporates all clinically relevant cell types and sub-tissues, and we are partnering with STEMCELL Technologies, Canada’s foremost biotechnology company, to commercialize the manufacturing platform. The cerebroids platform could prove to be a game changer for pharmaceutical testing and molecular medicine. The second part of the seminar will summarize our work on advancing the paradigm of ‘Medicine-by-Design’, which refers to the ab initio development of marketable therapies. Medicine-by-design involves 3 key pieces – bioinformatics-based target identification and candidate prediction, API manufacturing using synthetic biology, and design, synthesis and optimization of the drug formulation. Our group has established a validated pipeline comprising each of these 3 components and we have partnered with another Vancouver-based company, InMed Pharmaceuticals, to develop and market a therapy against Epidermolysis Bullosa Simplex (EBS), an orphan disease that affects nearly 60,000 people in North America.
Bio-sketch: Vikramaditya G. Yadav is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering and the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Vice-Chair of the Biotechnology Division of the Chemical Institute of Canada. He received his BASc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2007 and subsequently received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He then went on to conduct post-doctoral research at Harvard University. He joined the faculty at UBC in the summer of 2014. In a short span of 3 years, he has established a world-leading, industrially-connected interdisciplinary research laboratory investigating topics at the interface of biology, chemistry, engineering, medicine and economics. He has raised close to $1 million in research funds and he is currently working with 4 biotechnology companies in Vancouver to commercialize his research. He also serves on several administrative committees at the University of British Columbia, and is the Associate Director of ECOSCOPE, a Vancouver-based entrepreneurship hub for life scientists.