Biointerfacing Polymer Materials for Sensing and Drug Delivery
Mar 7, 2025
2:30PM to 3:30PM
Date/Time
Date(s) - 07/03/2025
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Categories
Prof. Caitlin Maikawa
Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto
Polymer materials are powerful tools to engineer drug delivery and biosensing technologies. Polymers are highly tunable and can be designed to interface with disease-associated microenvironment or biomarkers to enable targeted delivery, local biomarker monitoring, and controlled drug release. Our research focuses on engineering polymer materials to improve the management of chronic diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease and diabetes. In this presentation, I will highlight some of our work developing polymer materials to target drug delivery to inflamed intestinal mucosa and engineering simple polymer-based biosensors to monitor inflammation. Through this work, we aim to better understand how mucoadhesive properties change in inflamed environments, and to design materials that can be used for the detection of inflammation-related biomarkers.
Speaker bio:
Dr. Caitlin Maikawa’s research focuses on engineering dynamic polymer materials for drug delivery and biosensing applications. After receiving a BASc in Chemical Engineering at the University of Toronto, she completed her PhD at Stanford University in Bioengineering under the guidance of Eric Appel. Dr. Maikawa then joined the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a Schmidt Science Fellow with Jeffrey Karp and Yuhan Lee where she engineered devices for drug delivery and sensing in the gastrointestinal tract.
In 2023, she joined the University of Toronto’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Maikawa also holds a cross-appointment in the Department of Chemistry and is a member of the Acceleration Consortium. Her group continues to focus on how to modulate the properties of polymer materials for applications in chronic diseases like inflammatory bowel disease.