Chaitanya Karimanasseri, SEAS ’24, Princeton, NJ
I’m extremely grateful to the 2023 Career Services Summer Funding Grant for having enabled me to continue doing research this Summer 2023 in the laboratory of Dr. Pavan Atluri, MD, a cardiac surgeon-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. I started working in Dr. Atluri’s laboratory in the fall of 2021 as a Bioengineering major hoping to blend the fundamental engineering I was learning in the classroom with real-world applications in medicine. Since then, I’ve gained a diverse array of skills and experiences that have prepared and inspired me for a specific career in academic surgery and medicine going forward.
This Summer 2023, I continued my research into a novel engineered therapeutic for preventing heart failure after myocardial infarction (MI), or heart attack. Current MI treatments, while life-saving, cause various adverse effects that lead to adverse remodeling of the heart and, eventually, heart failure. So, there is a need for therapeutic strategies that protect long-term heart function and prevent heart failure after MI. Colchicine (Col) is a potent anti-inflammatory drug that helps protect heart function after MI in humans but is limited by off-target gastrointestinal toxicity. We hypothesized that encapsulating Col in a nanoparticle (NP) could enable its direct delivery to the heart, thus limiting its off-target toxicity and increasing its local efficacy. Such a colchicine nanoparticle (ColNP) could even be co-delivered with complementary treatments in a hydrogel, a type of polymer. Thus, my research this Summer 2023 aimed to continue my past work of troubleshooting the design and formulation of a NP to encapsulate Col, including by characterizing Col’s release characteristics from the NP and purifying the resulting ColNP formulation.
A lot of my work this summer involved actually formulating the ColNP with slightly modified methods each time—perhaps an added purification step this time or a different heating step the next. While I’ve made progress, there is still work to be done in perfecting this ColNP formulation for further in vitro and in vivo experiments. However, I realize now that the time I’ve spent is exactly what forms the bedrock of science and medicine. Research may take time, but the most consequential scientific findings are often the ones that have gone through the rigors of meticulous testing and revision through time spent by researchers with a focus on excellence.
“Strive for Excellence, with Integrity” has been my life’s motto, and I have applied that in full to my research. I hope to carry this ideal forward in my future career in academic surgery and medicine.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2023 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
