Hydrogels, water-based gels with varied biomedical applications, have become a key focus of bioengineering research in recent years, with the burgeoning field transforming the way diseases are being studied and potentially treated. A dentist and engineer, Kyle Vining, Assistant Professor of Preventive & Restorative Sciences at Penn Dental Medicine, is developing hydrogels in his lab to study inflammation. Specifically, his lab is investigating how physical cues control inflammation of white blood cells with the goal of developing new treatments for disease, ranging from cancer to fibrosis, the outcome of many chronic inflammatory diseases.
Among his projects, he has developed a hydrogel matrix that mimics the physical properties of fibrosis to see how white blood cells interact with the surrounding tissue. "Fibrosis is a physical change in tissues that produces a scar-like matrix that can impair cancer treatment, inhibit healing, and in general is not compatible with tissue regeneration," says Vining. "There's been a lot of effort on antifibrotic drugs, but we're looking at fibrosis differently. Instead of directly inhibiting fibrosis, we're trying to understand its consequences for the immune system because the immune system can be hijacked and become detrimental for your tissues."
Through a better understanding of the feedback loop between fibrotic tissue and the immune system, Vining hopes to design interventions for treating head and neck cancer, including ways to boost efficacy of immunotherapies. This work also has possible applications for facilitating wound healing and tissue remodeling during restorative dental procedures.
In other work, Vining and collaborators from Penn Engineering are gearing up to develop next-generation treatments for tooth decay. They are working on encapsulating mRNA inside lipid nanoparticles that can be delivered locally to dental tissues. "Using mRNA, we can reprogram the cells to produce their own medication to help promote healing of the tooth and improve long-term survival of the tooth cells," Vining says.
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