Jennifer Elisseeff
50th ANNIVERSARY DISTINGUISHED LECTURE
Morton Goldberg Professor and Director of the Translational Tissue Engineering Center
Wilmer Eye Institute in Chemical and Biological Engineering, Materials Science and Orthopedic Surgery
John Hopkins University School of Medicine
Seminar Information
The immune system is the first responder to trauma and foreign bodies such as biomaterials, yet this response and its capacity to orchestrate tissue repair has been largely ignored. Tissue engineering was introduced in the late 1980’s as a strategy to provide biological substitutes that addressed the dire shortage of organs for transplant. The field expanded to develop solutions for tissue damage throughout body and is now frequently termed Regenerative Medicine. We translated biomaterial hydrogel technologies for cartilage and soft tissue reconstruction. From this clinical experience, we discovered cells from adaptive immune system respond to biomaterials. We profiled in depth the immunological response to the wound environment and biological scaffolds. We discovered the role of the adaptive immune system and in particular that Th2 T cells were required for the scaffold stimulation of wound repair through the production of interleukin 4. We are now exploiting this discovery, and the role of the adaptive immune system in biomaterial responses, to stimulate wound healing for a number of tissue trauma applications and further biomaterials design.
Dr. Elisseeff is the Morton Goldberg Professor and Director of the Translational Tissue Engineering Center at Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Wilmer Eye Institute with appointments in Chemical and Biological Engineering, Materials Science and Orthopedic Surgery. She was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, and a Young Global Leader by World Economic Forum.
Jennifer received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in medical engineering from the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Later she was a Fellow at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Pharmacology Research Associate Program, where she worked in the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. She has published over 200 papers, book chapters, and patent applications and received a number of awards including the Carnegie Young Alumni Award and in 2002 she was named by MIT Technology Review as a top innovator under 35.
Jennifer’s research focus is the development of biomaterials for regenerative medicine applications in orthopedics, plastic and reconstructive surgery, and ophthalmology. She is also now investigating the role of Biomaterials-directed Regenerative Immunology and the role of the adaptive immune system in tissue repair. She is committed to the translation of regenerative biomaterials and has founded several companies (Cartilix and Aegeria) and has participated in a number of industry advisory boards (Kythera Biopharmaceuticals, Bausch and Lomb, Histogenics and Cellular Bioengineering).