CBE Centennial Seminar Series: Cathy Fromen (Univ. of Delaware)

Engineering Approaches Towards Diversifying Inhalable Therapeutics

While respiratory diseases globally number among the top causes of mortality, the field of pulmonary drug delivery has lagged behind other routes of administration in the application of novel therapeutic approaches. Most current inhalers are employed to treat asthma and have yet to effectively address many significant respiratory conditions, including COVID-19. A critical need remains to expand inhaled drug delivery beyond the limited number of current therapeutics. Towards this need, research in the Fromen lab focuses on the development of personalized immunomodulatory therapeutics for patients with a wide range of lung diseases. To overcome current challenges in the field, our group designs new approaches to therapeutic pulmonary aerosols, leveraging chemical engineering principles, immune engineering approaches, and additive manufacturing. Recent work in the lab has led to the design in vitro models of the lung, including biomaterials-inspired cell culture models and a full volume, 3D-printed dynamic airway deposition model that collectively enable us to test personalized aerosol delivery to targeted locations in the lung under breathing profiles. Parallel efforts from the lab have also resulted in the creation and characterization of nanoparticle therapeutics that can more efficiently direct innate immune responses within the lung, leading to more effective inhalable vaccines and immune-modulatory therapeutics. Overall, this work provides advances towards personalized inhaled particulate formulations, with potential future applications for novel treatments of COVID-19, cancer, inflammation, vaccination, and allergy.

Biography

Catherine Fromen is an Associate Professor in Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware. She received her Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in 2014. Her research focuses on respiratory diseases. Respiratory diseases remain a challenging therapeutic problem, resulting in high morbidity and mortality. These conditions range from infectious diseases of influenza, tuberculosis and pneumonia, to known genetic and immunological disorders of cystic fibrosis (CF), allergy, and lung cancers, and finally to acquired conditions dominated by airway obstructions and lung remodeling in COPD, asthma, and pulmonary fibrosis. With each of these diseases, physiological/pathological changes occur on many length scales, with dysfunction on the molecular level causing changes in cellular interactions, dynamics of the microenvironment, and resulting whole organ function. We are interested in applying engineering fundamentals and innovative tools with the latest understanding in immunology to better predict how these changes manifest at each length scale. Importantly, we seek to understand how these changes impact the efficacy of inhaled therapeutics and to develop translational aerosol designs in new therapeutic areas.

Three main areas of interest include:
1. Leveraging 3D printing to advance in vitro tools for pulmonary drug delivery testing
2. Using engineered particles to probe lung biology and immune function
3. Engineering novel therapeutics for controlled immune stimulation in the lung