Fall 2020 ChBE Virtual Seminar Series - Kaitlyn Sadtler
Tuesday, Sept. 8
Hosted by Assitant Professor Laurel Hind
Harnessing the Immune System in Tissue Regeneration & Medical Device Development
Any time a material is implanted within the body, our immune system responds to it, either positively to help integrate the material with the surrounding tissue, or negatively, causing fibrosis or excessive inflammation and tissue damage. In regenerative medicine, the immune system becomes critically important. Traumatic injuries induce immune responses whose goal is to prevent infection then quickly lay down scar tissue to seal off the injury and prevent any further contact with potentially hazardous pathogens. In order to develop novel therapeutics to promote tissue regeneration, we must consider the pattern of immune responses to both trauma and biomaterial implantation. Analyzing a biomaterial that is currently being tested in the context of traumatic muscle injury, we found that materials elicited a specific immune cell recruitment and activation, that if absent, resulted in ectopic adipogenesis, small irregular muscle fibers, and excessive fibrosis. If we preformed adoptive cell transfer on mice that lacked these immune cells, we were able to rescue the phenotype. Moving forward, understanding the basic immunologic responses to trauma and biomaterial implantation will result in uncovering mechanisms for targeting immune cells in pro-regenerative immunotherapies.
Biography
Dr. Kaitlyn Sadtler is an Earl Stadtman Investigator and Chief of the Section on Immuno-Engineering at the National Institutes of Health. She began her lab at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering after a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Chemical Engineering working on the molecular mechanisms of immune activation in the foreign body response. There, she was awarded an Ruth L Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellowship for her work on immunology and tissue engineering. She completed her Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where she showed a critical role for Th2-T cells in biomaterial-mediated muscle regeneration. Her research has been published in journals such as Science, Nature Methods, and others. She was recognized as a 2018 TED Fellow and delivered a TED talk that has been viewed >2.3 million times and listed as one of the top-viewed talks of 2018. Dr. Sadtler was selected for the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 List in Science and was selected as a 2020 TEDMED Research Scholar.