Rice University Department of Bioengineering presents week 4 of its webinar series on Frontiers in Bioengineering Research.
"Antibody-Based COVID-19 Diagnostics and Disease Therapeutics" will feature speakers Kaitlyn Sadtler from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and Andrew Tsourkas from the University of Pennsylvania. Sadtler will speak on "SARS-CoV2 Seroprevalence in Healthy Asymptomatic Adults with No Prior COVID-19 Diagnosis." Tsourkas will speak on "Engineering novel antibody and nanoparticle platforms for imaging and therapeutic applications."
Kaitlyn Sadtler is the Earl Stadtman Investigato and Chief, Section for Immuno-Engineering, NIH National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Sadtler joined NIBIB as an Earl Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigator and Chief of the Section for Immunoengineering in 2019. Prior to her arrival to the NIH, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Daniel Anderson, PhD, and Robert Langer, PhD, focusing on the molecular mechanisms of medical device fibrosis. During her time at MIT, Sadtler was awarded an NRSA Ruth L Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellowship, was listed on BioSpace’s 10 Life Science Innovators Under 40 To Watch and StemCell Tech’s Six Immunologists and Science Communicators to Follow.
Andrew Tsourkas is a Professor, Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania. Tsourkas leads a group that combines chemistry, nanotechnology, and protein engineering to create novel targeted imaging and therapeutic agents designed to improve the detection and treatment of cancer. Specific research interests include developing new nanoformulations that are capable of carrying extremely high payloads of drugs, sensitizing agents, and/or contrast agents; investigating new disease targeting strategies that maximize specificity and sensitivity; and developing new bioconjugation techniques that enable the highly efficient, site-specific labeling of targeting agents for imaging and therapeutic applications.