Continuing Education – Evening Lecture
Applications of Chemical Engineering in Designing Inhalable Therapeutics
Presenter: Catherine Fromen, PhD ChE
Assistant Professor
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
University of Delaware
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
5:30pm-6:30pm – Presentation
6:30pm-6:45pm – Q&A Session & Closing Remarks
PDH Credit: 1 credit
Location: Due to COVID, this will be an online presentation only
Price:
$10 each for attendees
Abstract:
While respiratory diseases globally number among the top causes of mortality, the field of pulmonary drug delivery has lagged behind other routes of administration in the application of novel therapeutic approaches. Most current inhalers are employed in the treatment of asthma and have yet to effectively address many significant respiratory conditions. A significant need remains to expand inhaled drug delivery beyond the limited number of current therapeutics. Thus, the overall goal of the Fromen lab is to develop personalized immunomodulatory therapeutics for patients with a wide range of lung diseases. To overcome current challenges in the field, our group designs new approaches to therapeutic pulmonary aerosols, leveraging chemical engineering principles, immune engineering approaches, and additive manufacturing. Recent work in the lab has led to the design of novel, 3D-printed, patient specific in vitro lung deposition tools that have enabled us to test personalized aerosol delivery to targeted locations in the lung. Parallel efforts from the lab have also resulted in the creation and characterization of nanoparticle therapeutics that can more efficiently direct innate immune responses within the lung. Overall, we believe this work provides advances to aerosol design rules that can inform personalized inhaled particulate formulations, with potential future applications for novel treatments for COVID-19, cancer, inflammation, vaccination, and allergy.
Biography:
Catherine Fromen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware. She received her PhD in Chemical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 2014 and performed postdoctoral studies at the University of Michigan as a University of Michigan’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined the University of Delaware in 2017, where her research group focuses on applying chemical engineering principles to pulmonary drug delivery. Dr. Fromen has authored over 35 manuscripts and patents and her team’s work has been recognized with recent awards, including receiving the AIChE’s 35 Under 35 Award in 2020, UD Excellence in Mentoring, and an NIH Early Stage Investigator (ESI) Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) (R35) in 2021. For more information and recent publications, visit her website: https://sites.udel.edu/cfromen/ and follow on Twitter @cfromen, @FromenLab.
Registration:
Please register no later than Tuesday, November 30 at 12:00 noon. Cancellation requests received by the registration deadline will be fully refunded.
Should you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Cynthia Tarun at tarun.aichedvs@gmail.com, 832-341-4960 (Mobile).