Bind cofounder Omid Farokhzad, associate professor at Brigham Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, came up with the novel method for building nanoparticles while he was a postdoctoral ...researcher in the lab of Robert Langer, an MIT chemical engineering professor. ...Farokhzad and Langer devised a method by which the building blocks of the nanoparticle and the drug self-assemble into a final product. The method by which the nanoparticles are built—from individual preparations of the two-block and three-block polymers—would also let researchers use high-throughput screening approaches, akin to how medicinal chemists design and test new drug compounds.
Spinning Spare Parts Susan Young Rojahn
MIT Technology Review.com,
05/2012
Newspaper Article
Cytograft has long focused on building replacement blood vessels for people who need dialysis, which cleans the blood of patients with kidney failure. Though the company’s earlier implants were made ...of extracellular matrix produced from a patient’s own cells, its researchers can now harvest the material from cells unrelated to the person receiving the graft and remove the “donor” cells completely. Molding the particles together leaves a complex network of channels behind—exactly what tissues engineers will need in order to produce, eventually, something like a liver, pancreas, or kidney.
