Angela Pannier
Biomedical Engineer and Professor William E. Brooks Engineering Leadership Fellow
"Innovation" brings to mind giant leaps and brand new discoveries. However, for the engineering researcher, innovation often comes in the forms of refining and clarifying the technologies that make our everyday lives safer, easier, or healthier. For Dr. Angela "Angie" Pannier’s biomedical engineering laboratory, innovation means improving current biomedical technologies to make them more efficient and more useful as well as developing new strategies.
The Pannier lab currently works on over 10 projects in biomaterials and gene delivery areas including DNA vaccines, tissue engineering of developmental biology, and nonviral gene delivery systems for stem cell and medical device applications. Nine doctoral students, lab manager Sarah Plautz, and several undergraduate students study different aspects of diagnostics, biotechnology, stem cells, embryology, and tissue development under the umbrella of the Pannier lab.
Their collaborators include partners within UNL and at the University of Nebraska Omaha, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, the Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research Dresden, and other industry associates, which provides students with experience both in industry and academia. Angie’s students practice teamwork, communication, and organization with diverse partners and projects that have allowed Angie and her lab to excel. In 2017, Angie was recognized for her creative and innovative research program with a National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award.
Supported by this NIH grant, Angie and her team have recently published four articles specifically focused on using chemical and environmental cues to enhance nonviral gene delivery. Angie and her lab members work on improving the transfer of DNA created within the lab into cells for the purpose of improving a diagnostic, therapy, or vaccine applications. Nonviral gene delivery methods focus on biomaterials, lipids or polymers, which are designed to mimic virus carriers that are often used to shuttle DNA to target cells.
The Pannier lab is interested in studying how to best prime recipient cells to be more responsive to receiving DNA from these nonviral methods. Cells used in the study are human adult stem cells from bone marrow or fat tissue that show great potential for clinical studies for their immune response and regenerative properties.
By studying how different drugs or microenvironments affect cells, Angie and her team can test better ways to deliver therapies to target cells. These two approaches may also translate more easily into clinical trials than traditional methods of designing new biomaterials.
Two recent papers look at how to best chemically prime stem cells for better gene delivery. In a first review paper, the lab studied how an anti-inflammatory steroid hormone (or gleucocortocoids) named dexamethasone increases the success of gene transfer. A second paper further clarifies the mechanism for how to treat cells with gleucocortocoids. This study was conducted with the intention of describing the various interactions affected by cell treatment with dexamethasone to create safer and more efficient future technologies.
The reverse side to these studies is how can the environment of the cell be modified in such a way to make the cell more receptive to therapy. Cell material interaction studies involve designing or changing the material to which stem cells are attached to see if that affects DNA delivery. In one paper, Angie and collaborators in Dresden describe the creation of polymer brushes that attach to materials compatible with living tissue, such as titanium, in order to make the surface of the titanium more able to adhere cells and promote DNA delivery. Another review paper was also published on how modifying the substrate biomaterial can prime cells.
Gene delivery covers only a portion of the many projects that Angie and her lab are currently working on. Angie comes to the idea of innovation from a creative vantagepoint that seeks to understand how to improve upon existing technologies and methods to better health outcomes. More efficient and safer DNA vaccines, tissue engineering, and nonviral gene delivery are just a few of the ways that Angie is having an impact on the biomedical field.