NIH Director’s New Innovator Award Funds Research to Develop New 3D Synthetic Models to Study IPF
Dr. April Kloxin, Centennial Career Development Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and associate professor of materials science and engineering, is one of 60 researchers from across the country who received the 2019 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. This award supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators who are within 10 years of their final degree or clinical residency and have not yet received a research project grant or equivalent NIH grant.
Specifically, Kloxin is developing a dynamic, three-dimensional co-culture model of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Using synthetic materials, she will mimic the extracellular matrix that surrounds cells. Then, Kloxin will study how changes in the microenvironment surrounding cells such as fibroblasts, epithelial and inflammatory cells — all important to the onset and progression of fibrosis — affects their tendency toward responses that promote fibrosis. The information collected will be compared to pre-clinical models and human data.
To uncover what induces fibrosis, Kloxin aims to develop reporter systems that reveal what, on a genetic level, causes an individual cell to flip into a wound healing state and how that process might be reversed. She also plans to uncover new molecular insights about sex differences in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which strikes more males than females.
The results of this research could have implications for the prevention and treatment of not only idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, but also other fibrotic diseases.
“The next five years will really be a whole new frontier for us,” said Kloxin.
Kloxin has been thinking about ways to address the challenges associated with studying lung disease since her days as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder from 2009 to 2011. There, she studied how cells in the lung that are responsible for regeneration are affected by the environments surrounding them. She found that the effects were more complex than she ever imagined.
Nearly a decade later, Kloxin is still curious about wound healing in lungs — and determined to answer some of the questions that have been bothering her and others.
“When I came here to start my own lab at UD, I started thinking: What other aspects of the lung are not well understood?” she said. “I started digging in to lung fibrosis, and I thought there could be an opportunity to use some of the tools that we had and expand them further for trying to understand not lung regeneration or lung development, which is part of what I was trying to have tools for at Colorado, but now to think about lung disease instead.”
For Kloxin, these challenging problems are highly motivating.
“I am attracted to the complexity of biological systems and like to make things that help solve complex problems,” said Kloxin. “As engineers, we stand to have a unique perspective on these complex systems and then to be able to generate tools to help to reduce down some of that complexity and provide insights.”
Source: www.udel.edu