PERSONALIZED MEDICINE
Personalized medicine tailors treatment for individual health, including cell and gene therapies for patient-specific disorders, as well as to preventative care regimens based on an individual's genetic disease propensity or biomarker presence. Opportunities for chemical engineers to contribute include:
- Develop appropriate models from atomic to systems scales for target discovery and to design medicines based on those targets.
- Apply data science and modeling to personalized medicine.
- Address the appropriate delivery of medicines in a safe and efficacious way and ensure the optimal dosage and route of delivery of medicines via systems biology and advances in manufacturing.
- Improve and simplify the delivery of multiple drugs, or combine multiple medicines into one delivery on a patient-demand case.
- Improve the reliability and lower the cost of cell-based immunotherapies.
- Identify key variables or biomarkers that lead to successfully engineered cells to improve the reliability and efficacy of treatment.
- Contribute to sensor design and analysis.
- Identify fault detection using physiological, cellular, metabolic, or other data to identify changes to function.
- Develop process modeling to represent complex relationships for biological systems and predict behavior.
ENGINEERING APPROACHES TO IMPROVING THERAPEUTICS
Although drug discovery is key to development of new types of drugs, significant challenges are presented in the large-scale manufacture of drugs, including industrial-level product generation, purification, and formulation. To advance therapeutics, chemical engineers can work to:
- Enable a predictive approach to vaccine subunit selection via the use of genetic data mining and machine learning with biomolecular computation.
- Develop protein engineering and computational and biomolecular design space for the discovery of new antigens.
- Design the solubility and biocompatibility of antigenic molecules for ease of manufacture and the downstream generation of purified vaccines.
- Manipulate antibodies on the molecular level using rapid assay methods and computation in combination with studies of manufacturing properties to achieve high yields and lower overall cost.
- Engineer agents that promote protein stability under physiological conditions for prolonged times.
Success Story: mRNA Vaccine Development
One of the most important examples in recent history of the integration of engineering and biology is the rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine using mRNA technology. RNA is an information molecule that is modular and specific. The idea to use mRNA as a vaccine molecule grew in part from conversations between two chemical engineers—Bob Langer and Noubar Afeyan—who launched Moderna in 2010 to explore the possibility of successfully delivering mRNA to enable cells within the body to produce the protein antigens for vaccines. A key challenge was the ability to deliver mRNA, which is a highly negatively charged macromolecule, systemically to cells. It required generation of an appropriate formulation using cationic lipid nanoparticles, which was a problem suited for chemical engineers. It is likely that in 50 years, all protein drugs will be mRNA drugs. Chemical engineers can contribute to frontiers such as guide RNAs that can alter the expression of multiple genes at once.
MODELING AND UNDERSTANDING THE MICROBIOME
One of the frontiers of biomedicine is the development of treatments for human health based on the microbiome—the naturally occurring microbes that live in the body and facilitate biological functions. New tools for predictive modeling of cellular systems, combined with access to large banks of genomic data, to make progress provide opportunities for engineers to:
- Apply computational approaches to enable predictive capabilities of specific network signaling pathways.
- Apply the advances made in metabolic engineering from genome-scale metabolic models towards a general understanding of the microbiome.
- Address the expansion, cost, and scalability of native microbiota-based therapies.
- Enable more effective predictive approaches and more personalized medicine methodologies for treatments of patients through machine learning in combination with the information gained from genomics and systems biology models.
- Develop a systems approach to be able to replicate important interdependencies in interacting cellular systems while incorporating new or enhanced functionalities.
- Expand the use of engineered microbes for therapeutic applications, from infection and inflammation to metabolic, endocrine, and autoimmune disorders.
- Enable advancements in metabolic engineering via an understanding of complex signaling behaviors, modeling, and the manipulation of synthetic biology tools.
- Design cells for manipulating the generation of desired compounds, the rate of generation, the selectivity for a given target, and the longer-term stability of the reacting system.
- Determine effective modes of delivery to specific organs, which may require the engineering of new biomaterials that support transfer of microbiota to different parts of the body.
DESIGN OF MATERIALS, DEVICES, AND DELIVERY MECHANISMS
Chemical engineers have had a significant in the development of medical devices, particularly in those that control drug administration such as infusion pumps, and transdermal patches, among others. Continued opportunities in this realm include:
- Design self-regulated pumps, beyond the artificial pancreas, through the development of novel formulation strategies, pump designs, control algorithms, and continuous sensors.
- Develop completely non-invasive methods for drug delivery devices.
- Advance sustained release depots to extend the release duration of drugs and long-term compatibility of depot systems within the immune system.
- Improve targeted drug delivery at the nanoscale.
- Develop a better understanding of transport processes and leverage this understanding to accomplish better targeting.
- Improve the sensitivity, accuracy, and modeling based on the measurements of continuous, wearable devices such as sweat-based sensors.
- Develop large-scale network models to understand the dynamics and connectivity of events embedded in the data collected by wearable sensors.
- Develop tools to minimize the burden of pre-clinical drug development to reduce the cost and time of development and provide more relevant pre-clinical information.
- Understand the connectivity of various organs-on-chips, and assess the role of flow on cells and organs.
HYGIENE AND THE ROLE OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING
Engineers played a major role in history in developing a sanitary infrastructure, such as water treatment systems, which has reduced deadly diseases and increased life expectancy in much of the world. Recent work has advanced understanding of the link between indoor air quality and health. Continued work in this realm is needed, including opportunities to:
- Identify the time scales for the airborne suspension of long-lived aerosols.
- Develop new materials and formulations that address the balance between antimicrobial efficacy and environmental and toxicity issues.
- Develop materials that indicate health challenges (e.g., color-changing masks) that can then be addressed by physical barriers or treatments.
- Advance filtration technologies for facemasks and indoor filters informed by recent advances in coating materials, additive manufacturing, and systems engineering.
ENGINEERING SOLUTIONS FOR ACCESSIBILITY AND EQUITY IN HEALTHCARE
Chemical engineers have opportunities to address the health disparities that prevent some population groups from attaining their full health potential as measured by differences in incidence, prevalence, mortality, the burden of disease, and other adverse health conditions, including:
- Contribute to the creation of affordable vaccines for low-income populations who may not have access to traditional vaccine supply chains, distribution facilities, or cold-storage options.
- Consider technologies that are adaptable to local needs and can be maintained by people themselves using resources the community can afford.
- Incorporate human-centered designs into technologies to make them more accessible, equitable, and culturally sensitive.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Modern biomolecular engineering is very much at the intersection of chemical engineering and molecular biology, biochemistry, materials science, and medicine. Current challenges for applications in health present opportunities for chemical engineers to apply systems-level approaches and their ability to work across disciplines.
- Federal research investments in biomolecular engineering should be directed to fundamental research to
- advance personalized medicine and the engineering of biological molecules, including proteins, nucleic acids, and other entities such as viruses and cells;
- bridge the interface between materials and devices and health;
- improve the use of tools from systems and synthetic biology to understand biological networks and the intersections with data science and computational approaches; and
- develop engineering approaches to reduce costs and improve equity and access to health care.
- Researchers in academic and government laboratories and industry practitioners should form interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaborations to develop pilot- and demonstration-scale projects in advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing processes.
