Dr. Kelly Schultz, Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, received a renewal of NIH funding entitled "Determining the Response of hMSCs to Cytokines in Synthetic Wound Healing Materials" as part of their R15 (Academic Research Enhancement Award) program. This funding will support research that enhances the biomedical environment at Lehigh. The project goal is to characterize the relation between pericellular degradation and human mesenchymal stem cell motility in response to locally and environmentally presented cytokines to establish design rules to enhance cell delivery to wounded tissue. This work will establish design rules that leverage native environmental and locally presented chemical cues present during wound healing to increase and direct hMSC motility to enhance delivery of hMSCs to a wound from an implanted synthetic hydrogel scaffold.
This R15 is a renewal of a successful previously funded R15 entitled "Understanding how MSCs controllably remodel their environment". This previous work has resulted in five publications and is part of the Ph.D. work of Maryam Daviran.
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