BME7900 Seminar: Jeannine Coburn (WPI)
Bacterial Cellulose and Bifunctional Antimicrobial Peptides for Advanced Wound Dressing Applications
Bacterial-derived cellulose (BC) has been studied as a promising material for wound dressing applications due to its biocompatibility, water holding capacity, liquid/gas permeability, and handleability properties. Although BC has been studied as a dressing material for cutaneous wounds, to date, there have been a limited number of studies around incorporating antibacterial properties, specifically peptides, into the cellulose material. Tethered antimicrobial peptides (AMP) may overcome the limitations associated with conventional antibiotics and antiseptic agents, such as bacterial resistance. Bifunctional synthetical peptides can be created using carbohydrate-binding peptides (CBP) to immobilize AMPs to the surface of BC to aid in the prevention of wound infection while also altering the inflammatory environment. This talk will highlight the work from the Coburn lab in tethering AMPs to BC membranes and recent directions utilizing databases and machine learning tools to identify improvements for peptide design and function.
Bio:
Jeannine Coburn is an associate professor and principal investigator of the Functional Biomaterials Lab at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Central Massachusetts. She earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2006 and her Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2012 as an NIH NRSA predoctoral fellow. After completing an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship at Tufts University under the guidance of Prof. David L. Kaplan, she joined the faculty at WPI in 2016 with a joint appointment in chemical engineering. Prof. Coburn has received several awards for her academic excellence, including the 2020 WPI Sigma Xi Outstanding Junior Faculty Award and the 2021 WPI Board of Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Academic Advising. In addition, she was awarded the NSF CAREER Award (2023).
Prof. Coburn has co-authored over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles, one book chapter, and four review articles, as well as co-invented two patents. Her expertise lies in the field of biomaterials and their applications in drug delivery, tissue engineering, and disease modeling. Her current research interests focus on a variety of biomaterials, including silk fibroin, chondroitin sulfate, hyaluronic acid, and bacterial-derived cellulose. Her work involves in vitro modeling of solid tumors, functional modifications of biomaterial surfaces and backbones, drug delivery and photothermal therapy for oncology applications, and neuroregeneration.
