Chemical Engineering Alumni Present Capstone Project “DendriNow” at AIChE San Francisco
Last Spring, a Chemical Engineering capstone team consisting of Jennifer Langh ChE'16, Melanie Guerin ChE'16, Robert Kuhn ChE'16, and Grant Levy ChE'16 were looking for inspiration. They wanted to find a capstone project that could produce something tangible, as opposed to the typical theoretical nature of these projects. They were rewarded with an opportunity to team up with Northeastern's Dr. Shashi Murthy and his laboratory group to work on an exciting infant cancer treatment.
The idea behind the treatment is to modify a cancer patient's blood cells to then be returned as a personalized treatment in the form of dendritic cells. Their project focused on two aspects: optimizing the current manufacturing method for dendritic cell production and to design an affordable, disposable system to automate the process. Working in Dr. Murthy's lab, the group was able to improve the yield of dendritic cells by 66%, a significant improvement when considering single patient-specific doses. Their DendriNow cell culture product design also received a provisional patent and will be the subject of an oral presentation at the AIChE National Conference in San Francisco next week.