Engineering New Treatments
Chemical engineering faculty explore medical applications
Chemical engineering plays a unique role in medical research from creating biomaterials, novel medical devices, drug stability and absorption, optimizing pharmaceutical manufacturing processes, and drug delivery systems.
Chemical engineers also contribute to scaling up and manufacturing these technologies and bridging the gap between research and clinical application. The ability to manipulate molecular interactions, optimize separation processes, and enhance mass transfer efficiency makes chemical engineering indispensable in advancing medical technology, improving patient outcomes, and driving innovations in healthcare.
UIC’s Chemical Engineering Department is engaged in many research projects with medical applications, including new drug delivery systems to treat serious eye diseases, an implantable membrane that could be a key component of future artificial kidneys, and technologies to improve the drug creation and manufacturing process.
Nonparticle delivery to transform neuron degeneration treatment
Ying Liu, Dr. Satish C. and Asha Saxena Professor of Chemical Engineering and Interim Associate Dean of Research at the College of Engineering, has developed a platform technology for high-throughput screening and scalable production of lipid and polymeric nanoparticles for drug delivery, including small molecular drugs, DNAs, and RNAs.
“We are developing a high-throughput screening process to optimize the nanoparticle formulation by incorporating self-driving robotics and synchrotron advanced photon beams,” Liu said. “This will help us quickly optimize the formulation, control nanoparticle quality, stability, and reproducibility, which are essential for the commercialization of these nanoparticles that we can also scale up for production.”
Liu, and Thera Vision Inc. received a grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity Innovation Voucher Program to develop a nanoparticle drug delivery system for treatment of eye neuron degeneration. Liu and her team have designed nanoparticles via an eyedrop for sustained compound release, which makes the treatment less invasive.
Degenerative eye diseases are typically caused by the breakdown of cells and tissues in the eyes and can often be age-related or due to other underlying medical conditions. Various degenerative eye diseases can result in low vision or blindness including age-related macular degeneration (AMD), cataracts, glaucoma, and diabetic retinopathy.
The current treatments for low vision degenerative eye diseases consist of invasive surgical procedures and carry a high risk for ] complications. The procedures deliver therapeutic agent to the back of the eye and has a low rate of patient compliance and acceptance.
Their eyedrop drug delivery platform precisely controls essential nanoparticle properties, boasts high drug loading, and can significantly increase hydrophobic drug solubility and bioavailability.
The team hopes to be able to conduct a direct phase II efficacy trial in selected AMD patients soon.
Membranes treat kidney disease and restore function
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one in seven adults may have chronic kidney disease, which is a leading cause of death in the U.S. Every day, about 360 people begin treatment for kidney failure, whether hemodialysis or kidney transplantation.
Hemodialysis filters waste products and excess fluid from the blood when the kidneys are unable to do so before the filtered blood flows back into the body. Many patients undergo this procedure three times a week for between three to five hours per session. While hemodialysis prolongs life for many people, it also causes significant stress to the body. The average life expectancy for people who go through hemodialysis is about five to 10 years.
Chemical Engineering Associate Professor Sangil Kim and a team of researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) led by Juergen Biener have developed a 3D-printed high-efficiency biomimetic gyroid membrane. This compact, implantable hemodialysis membrane mimics many key functional features of the kidneys. In doing so, it acts as the kidney does and helps filter out the urea and creatinine, which are major waste products typically excreted by the kidneys and valuable markers for kidney disease.
Their research aims to replace the large, bulky, floor-standing hemodialysis machines through an implantable hemodialysis membrane that enables implantable or wearable Renal Assist Devices (RADs).
The 3D gyroid membrane design enables filtration rates 10 times faster filtration in a device 10 times smaller than conventional hemodialysis systems, thus opening the door to wearable/implantable RADs that could function as artificial kidneys. The typical size for a hemodialysis machine measures almost three feet tall and weighs about 200 pounds.
Kim and his UIC team are focused on photoresist design and synthesis, ensuring excellent blood compatibility and biofouling resistance, as well as the hemodialysis membrane testing. Meanwhile, researchers at LLNL are responsible for the 3D gyroid membrane fabrication.
“We are currently in the very early stages of testing this membrane using pig’s blood,” Kim said. “We have not yet implanted anything to test the membrane’s performance. Once we secure additional funding for the next phase, we will collaborate with medical schools to conduct implantation studies in live animals.”
Even though they are in the early stages of this research, Kim said their work has been auspicious. He added other collaborators have proposed applying the 3D gyroid membranes developed by Kim, Biener, and their team for a wide range of applications, including artificial lungs, water purification, biomolecules separation, gaseous separation, catalysis, energy storage, and element recovery.
Kim hopes that the implantable 3D gyroid hemodialysis membrane technology will one day allow kidney failure patients to live normal, unrestricted lives without the burden of traditional dialysis treatment.
Optimizing drug, vaccine development
Chemical engineering plays a crucial role in the pharmaceutical industry, as it is responsible for designing, optimizing, and scaling up processes for drug production. Chemical engineers also help ensure efficient and safe manufacturing of medicines from research to commercialization.
Throughout this research, Singh has worked or is working with a variety of pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, Takeda, Zoetis, Abbvie, Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), Eli Lilly, and Genentech.
One of these projects was to screen different forms of drugs reliably and reproducibly under different crystallization conditions.
It takes around a decade and billions of dollars to bring a new drug to patients after a molecule is first identified to treat a disease. A significant portion of that 10-year period is spent on process development, where scientists screen different polymorphic forms of APIs and develop robust processes to manufacture a stable form with the acceptable physical properties to turn that into pills or tablets.
Meenesh Singh
“Almost two-thirds of over-the-counter drugs are solid forms. There’s a strong emphasis on making tablets because they are shelf stable; however, there are challenges to making those tablets. We want to make sure that the drug which is in there is in the right physical form.”
| Chemical Engineering Associate Professor
Optimizing drug, vaccine development
Part of that research consisted of former UIC graduate student Paria Coliaie and AbbVie scientists Manish S. Kelkar and Nandkishor K. Nere, who is also an adjunct professor in the UIC Chemical Engineering Department, who developed a controlled microfluidic crystallization device to improve the screening process that pharmaceutical companies use to identify the most stable crystalline form of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and to scale up the crystallization of stable forms.
Coliaie’s microfluidic device created the right conditions to study the formation of these crystals of different forms and that research led to another project which was funded by a group of industry to develop an automated screening system to automatically feed liquids, analyze crystals, and studied which condition to give which crystal. Their screening platform, eN-XTAL, will be commercialized by Singh’s startup company eN-RAMPS.
Another biopharmaceutical project in Singh’s lab is high throughput screening of lipid nanoparticles. Lipid nanoparticles are mostly used in encapsulating mRNA vaccine delivery like the COVID-19 vaccine.
Singh’s team is developing the eN-LNP system as a high-throughput LNP synthesis and characterization platform designed to accelerate drug delivery and gene therapy development. Traditional LNP formulation is labor-intensive, requiring extensive screening of lipid compositions, cargo ratios, and processing conditions. Current microfluidic-based methods allow only one formulation at a time, limiting efficiency. The eN-LNP system overcomes this bottleneck by enabling simultaneous formulation of over 10 LNP variants using a fully automated, pressure-driven microfluidic platform.
Beyond its commercial potential, the system’s ability to accelerate vaccine and therapeutic development will have a profound societal impact, improving access to life-saving RNA-based treatments, cancer therapies, and future pandemic responses.
All of these projects can help speed up development and lower costs, which means patients will get newer treatments faster and at more affordable prices.