Sumit Mehrotra
mehrotr4(at)msu.edu
2125 Engineering Building
517.432.1003
Hometown: Lucknow, UP, India
Undergraduate Institution:
IIT Bombay, India
Interests: I play Racquetball regularly; Mountaineering (rock climbing, ice climbing) is one of the adventurous activities that I enjoy much; I go for long drives whenever get time, preferably for nature sight-seeing; Often clubbing, and movies adds fun to my life.
Project title: Polyelectrolyte Multilayers for
Tissue Engineering and Drug Delivery Applications
Project Description: Polyelectrolyte Multilayers (PEMs)
is a sequential assembly of oppositely charged polyelectrolytes held
together by the virtue of various interaction forces such as, hydrogen
bonds, electrostatic, hydrophobic or Vander Waals forces. Various strong
and weak polyelectrolytes, including bio-molecules like nucleic acids and
proteins, can be employed to fabricate PEMs, and fabrication conditions
can be easily tuned to give high control over the architecture of these
nanoscale films.
Desired control over the architecture of PEMs makes them extremely
demanding in the fields of tissue engineering and drug delivery. One
aspect of tissue engineering is to develop new materials in vitro in a
controlled 2-D or 3-D fashion such that they mimic extracellular matrices
with regard to multiple cell functionalities. PEMs can be made cytophilic
or cytophobic (cell adhering or resisting) based on the fabrication
conditions, and soft lithography techniques such as microcontact printing
further controls such behavior in 2-D or 3-D. Tissues and organs in vivo
exhibit multiple layered cellular architectures to maintain differentiated
cellular functions, and PEMs along with soft lithographic techniques
carries a potential to develop such multilayer cellular architectures in
vitro. Drug delivery requires biomaterials which can release multiple drug
molecules inside the body in a controlled manner. Charged therapeutic
agents can be incorporated into a PEM structure and then timely released
under the physiological conditions by controlling fabrication and
post-fabrication conditions of PEMs. PEMs along with soft lithographic
techniques are the promising approaches to develop novel bio-functional
materials for these applications.
PI: Christina Chan, Ilsoon Lee