School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
May/June 2014

New view of inflammation

“Inflammation research has been at a standstill,” says assistant professor of biomedical engineering Anjelica Gonzalez. “We understand really well the molecular interactions that lead to leukocytes getting stuck on the vessel lining, then crawling through the endothelial cells of the vessel wall and into the tissue. But the vessel is much more complex than just the endothelial cells.”

Gonzalez’s team—including Bayer professor of translational medicine Jordan Pober ’76PhD, ’77MD, and engineering doctoral student Holly Lauridsen ’13MS—seeks to recreate that complexity with a new model of inflammation that uses multiple human blood-vessel cell types. Using the model, the team has already shown that cells on the outside lining of the vessel signal the inside endothelial cells in a way that can inhibit inflammation; chronic inflammation might therefore be caused when the outside cells are hindered by disease. Also, when the two types of cells are together, one particular molecule is much more effective than when the cells are apart.

“That was a really unique finding, one that means that molecule should be a target for inhibiting leukocyte migration into the tissue,” says Gonzalez. The team seeks to further increase the model’s complexity, paving the way for cell therapies that inhibit chronic inflammation.

Turning up the heat on enzymes

Like Goldilocks, enzymes don’t tolerate conditions that are too hot or too cold. To address this problem, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering Corey Wilson has developed a method for designing temperature-adaptive enzymes. This innovation complements previous experiments that have focused solely on enzyme structure and flexibility, the sequence of the enzyme’s amino acid building blocks, and how the enzyme utilizes energy. Using Wilson’s method, enzymes can be designed to function in the many industrial reactions that would otherwise be “too hot,” which causes the enzyme to lose its structure, or “too cold,” which slows enzyme reaction to the point of uselessness. “You might say to me, ‘Look, I need to catalyze this industrial reaction at a hundred degrees,’” says Wilson, “and now we can do that.” Or as Goldilocks might say, now any temperature is just right.