Please join the Department of Chemical Engineering on Monday, March 18, for a seminar by Dr. Todd Hoare, an associate professor from McMaster University’s Department of Chemical Engineering, speaking on microgels as functional biomedical nanoparticles.
Abstract
Microgels, hydrogel particles in the sub-micron size range, have attracted broad interest as potential carriers for drugs and building blocks for functional materials. However, while many interesting model in vitro studies have been conducted using functional microgels in biomedical applications, the practical utilization of microgels in biomedical applications remains in its infancy. This is in part due to the fact that the use of microgels in vivo is limited by the typically rapid diffusion of water-soluble drugs observed from highly hydrated microgel particles, the limited capacity of microgels to load more hydrophobic therapeutics, the challenge of fabricating very small (<50 nm) microgels that have high penetrability in vivo, and/or the capacity to design biologically-relevant networks of microgels with cytocompatible chemistries and relevant mechanical strengths.
In this presentation, Professor Hoare will describe recent work from his lab to address these challenges using two classes of microgels: thermoresponsive microgels based on poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) or poly(oligoethylene glycol methacrylate) that can reversibly shrink/swell as the temperature is increased/decreased and starch-based microgels produced via a scalable extrusion process that have exceptionally small particle sizes (20-50 nm). By rationally engineering the structure of thermoresponsive microgels and applying new chemistries and assembly approaches to fabricate, functionalize, and assemble both classes of microgels, they have demonstrated the utility of microgels for drug delivery to the brain, the fabrication of anti-fouling coatings, and the design of anti-cancer therapeutics.
Biographical Sketch
Todd Hoare is the Canada Research Chair in Engineered Smart Materials (Tier 2), a University Scholar, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at McMaster University.
He received a B.Sc. (Eng.) in Engineering Chemistry from Queen’s University in 2001 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from McMaster in 2006. He returned to McMaster in 2008 to join the faculty after a two-year NSERC-sponsored post-doctoral fellowship in Robert Langer’s laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Hoare’s work on “smart” environmentally-responsive hydrogels and nanoscale drug delivery vehicles has been profiled by Popular Science, Maclean’s, and BBC for its potential in solving clinical challenges through innovative materials design.
He is a current NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellow and has received the 2016 Early Career Investigator Award from the Canadian Biomaterials Society, an Early Researcher Award, and the 2009 John Charles Polanyi Prize in Chemistry from the Government of Ontario in recognition of his early career research accomplishments. Dr. Hoare is the past-president of the Canadian Biomaterials Society and the Canadian Chapter of the Controlled Release Society, a Co-Editor of Chemical Engineering Journal, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of Biomacromolecules and Colloid and Polymer Science.