November 27 - December 4, 2020
November 27 - December 4, 2020 (Virtual)
2020 MRS Spring/Fall Meeting

Symposium F.SM07-Biomaterials for Studying and Controlling the Immune System

The immune system is an enormously complex network of cells and molecules that work together to defend the body against infectious disease, cancer and other invaders, all while leaving healthy cells and tissues unaffected.Immunology, therefore, is central to many biomedical applications. As our understanding of the immune system continues to grow, immunoengineering will become an increasingly important approach to understand, manipulate, and eventually control the immune system to address biomedical challenges ranging from infectious disease to cancer to auto-immune diseases to biomaterials for regenerative medicine. This symposium will cover a broad array of topics from fundamental interactions of the immune system with implanted or administered biomaterials to controlled delivery of immunomodulatory compounds to engineered biomaterials for directing/exploring cell behavior ex-vivo. Symposium attendees will benefit from speakers sharing their broad expertise in materials science, bioengineering, and immunology and will be exposed to the many groundbreaking new developments and discoveries in this fast-growing interdisciplinary field.

Topics will include:

  • Biomaterials for controlled delivery of vaccines
  • Biomaterials for controlled delivery of cancer immunotherapies
  • Understanding the ways implanted biomaterials interact with and direct the immune system
  • Biomaterials for inducing antigen-specific tolerance
  • Immunoengineering

Invited Speakers:

  • Cameron Alexander (University of Nottingham, United Kingdom)
  • Joel Collier (Duke University, USA)
  • Jennifer Elisseeff (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
  • Oyvind Halass (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway)
  • Paula Hammond (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
  • Jeffrey Hubbell (The University of Chicago, USA)
  • Darrell Irvine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
  • Chrisopher Jewel (University of Maryland, USA)
  • Benjamin Keselowsky (University of Florida, USA)
  • Jamal Lewis (University of California, Davis, USA)
  • Wendy Liu (University of California, Irvine, USA)
  • Mikael Martino (Monash University, Australia)
  • David Mooney (Harvard University, USA)
  • Rebecca Pampano (University of Virginia, USA)
  • Lonnie Shea (University of Michigan, USA)
  • Ankur Singh (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
  • Nicole Steinmetz (University of California, San Diego, USA)
  • Molly Stevens (Imperial College London, United Kingdom)
  • Li Tang (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
  • Susan Thomas (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)

Symposium Organizers

Kara Spiller
Drexel University
Biomedical Engineering
USA

Evan Scott
Northwestern University
Biomedical Engineering
USA

Derfogail Delcassian
The University of Nottingham
Division of regenerative medicine and cellular therapies
United Kingdom

Eric Appel
Stanford University
USA

Topics

biological biomaterial biomedical biomimetic cellular (material type) organic polymer tissue