Lecture focuses on biomaterials to regenerate nerve tissue

Dr. Jeffrey Hubbell, director of the Institute for Biomedical Engineering in Zurich, Switzerland, is the speaker for this year’s 12th annual Robert F. Rushmer Lecture, sponsored by the UW Department of Bioengineering.

Hubbell, an expert and innovator in developing materials that will work with the human body to heal tissues and even grow new tissues, will speak at 4 p.m., Friday, March 31, in Turner Auditorium (D-209) of the Health Sciences Center. A reception and bioengineering poster session will follow in the I-Court Rotunda.

His topic is “Approaches with Biomaterials to Engineering the Healing of Tissues.” The lecture is free and open to everyone interested.

The institute that Hubbell heads is sponsored jointly by the University of Zurich and ETH (Neuroscience Center) Zurich. He moved there in 1997 from the California Institute of Technology.

Hubbell has worked for several years to develop materials that can be implanted in the human body and will mimic natural processes of healing in ways current synthetic materials can’t. One way scientists are trying to make such materials involves incorporating biological substances, such as the fibrin naturally produced in clotting blood. Another approach, sometimes used in the same material, is to add natural growth factors and proteins to the material.

Hubbell’s laboratory has focused on developing implantable fibrin-based and synthetic materials that could help peripheral nerves (those outside the central nervous system) to regenerate. These “biomaterials” could also be used to deliver drugs to specific sites inside the body without affecting other areas.

Born in the United States, Hubbell earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at Kansas State University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Rice University in Houston in 1986. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, from 1986 to 1994, and then became professor of chemical engineering at CalTech.

The lecture is named for Robert F. Rushmer, the founding director of the Center for Bioengineering, which became a department jointly administered by the UW schools of Medicine and Engineering in 1997. Rushmer is now professor emeritus of bioengineering. ¶