Ebong and Bajpayee Receive Prestigious PECASE Award
ChE/BioE Associate Professor Eno Ebong and BioE Associate Professor Ambika Bajpayee were awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the federal government to outstanding early career scientists. They were recognized for their work in finding solutions to some of the greatest challenges in modern medicine.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cody Mello-Klein. Main photo: Eno Ebong and Ambika Bajpayee were two of 400 scientists and engineers in the country to be awarded Presidential Early Career Awards. Photos by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
Two Northeastern professors receive prestigious early-career awards for pioneering bioengineering research
In early January, Ambika Bajpayee, an associate professor of bioengineering at Northeastern University, and Eno Ebong, an associate professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering at Northeastern, were bestowed the federal government’s highest honor given to early career scientists—the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), recognizing their work in finding solutions to some of the greatest challenges in modern medicine. They were two of just 400 scientists in the country to receive this honor.
Bajpayee is a leading researcher in bioelectriceuticals—electrically charged therapeutics that enhance drug delivery. Her work focuses on developing innovative methods to deliver treatments to connective tissues, such as cartilage, which have traditionally been difficult to target effectively.
Ebong studies the mechanical forces in the body impacting the cells that line the blood vessels. Known as endothelial cells, they protect blood vessels from diseases like cancer metastasis and neurodegeneration.
Both Bajpayee and Ebong are pioneers in their respective forms of bioengineering, leading the way with work that aims to provide solutions to some of the most pressing challenges in modern medicine.
Electrically charged drugs for lasting relief
Bajpayee pioneers bioelectriceuticals to improve drug delivery to hard-to-treat connective tissues like cartilage.
Tissue like cartilage is where muscular-skeletal joint diseases develop, but because it’s avascular, any drug that is injected into, for example, a knee joint for pain relief, dissipates fairly quickly.
“The drugs are effective, but if you can enable a sustained release of the drug to the target site, that’s when you can actually solve the problem and enable clinical translation of these drugs,” Bajpayee says.
That’s exactly what her lab has set out to solve by leveraging the naturally occurring electrical fields in our bodies. Tissue like cartilage carries a strong negative, so Bajpayee and her lab change the proteins and other molecules in the therapeutics themselves to a positive charge at the molecular level.
The attractive forces that occur end up creating, with a single injection, an “intra-cartilage drug depot” that can deliver drugs to a site in the body over weeks or months, instead of a few days.
“When we inject them into rat and rabbit joints, we’ve shown in multiple papers that very quickly, before they get cleared out from the joint space, they go into the tissue,” Bajpayee says. “They can enable 200 to 400 times higher uptake into the tissue.”
She has applied this method to aiding in the regeneration and repair of cartilage and administering pain relief, But her lab has also expanded the same concept to other negatively charged tissues, including in the gastrointestinal, spine and eye, to help mitigate degenerative diseases.
Studying forces to prevent vascular disease
Whereas Ebong’s previous research examined blood flow as a mechanobiological force, the work for which she was awarded examined the impact of solid forces exerted by tissue in the blood vessel wall.
“Maybe in normal conditions, one has compliant and flexible blood vessels and in hypertension, for example, they’re a little bit stiffer,” Ebong says. “That can make one more prone to disease. So, as engineers we developed cell culture-based models that allow us to expose cells that are isolated from human donors in an experimental setting where we’re able to expose them to a combination of the flow force as well as the solid force that is derived from the tissue stiffness.”
Read full story at Northeastern Global News