Ambika Bajpayee receives Department of Defense Discovery Award
Bioengineering Assistant Professor Ambika Bajpayee, who recently joined Northeastern, has been awarded a $310K DOD Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program Discovery Award. Collaborators on the grant include Sunny Zhou (Professor of Chemistry) and Sandra Shefelbine (Associate Professor of Bioengineering). This grant will fund a project on the design of cartilage targeting therapies for the treatment of osteoarthritis (OA), a degenerative joint disease which affects 150 million people around the world but does not have a cure yet. The work promises to enable clinical translation of potential disease modifying OA drugs which are currently limited by a lack of tissue targeting drug delivery systems.
Prof. Bajpayee’s lab, located in the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC), uses concepts of nanomedicine and bio-electrostatics to design peptide and protein based carriers for targeted, sustained drug delivery to specific intra-tissue and intra-cellular sites. Her interests include understanding mechanisms leading to degenerative joint diseases due to aging and traumatic injuries.