Ambika Bajpayee and Eno Ebong received the national awards, recognizing their work in finding solutions to some of the greatest challenges in modern medicine.
Ambika Bajpayee, an associate professor of bioengineering at Northeastern University, is a leading researcher in bioelectriceuticals — electrically charged therapeutics that enhance drug delivery.
Her work focuses on developing innovative methods to deliver treatments to connective tissues, such as cartilage, which have traditionally been difficult to target effectively.
Eno Ebong, an associate professor of chemical and bioengineering at Northeastern, studies the mechanical forces in the body impacting the cells that line blood vessels. Known as endothelial cells, they protect blood vessels from diseases like cancer metastasis and neurodegeneration.
Both Bajpayee and Ebong are pioneers in their respective forms of bioengineering, leading the way with work that aims to provide solutions to some of the most pressing challenges in modern medicine.
In early January, they were bestowed the federal government’s highest honors given to early career scientists.
Bajpayee pioneers bioelectriceuticals to improve drug delivery to hard-to-treat connective tissues like cartilage.
Tissue like cartilage is where muscular-skeletal joint diseases develop, but because it’s avascular, any drug that is injected into, for example, a knee joint for pain relief, dissipates fairly quickly.
“The drugs are effective, but if you can enable a sustained release of the drug to the target site, that’s when you can actually solve the problem and enable clinical translation of these drugs,” Bajpayee says.
That’s exactly what her lab has set out to solve by leveraging the naturally occurring electrical fields in our bodies. Tissue like cartilage carries a strong negative, so Bajpayee and her lab change the proteins and other molecules in the therapeutics themselves to a positive charge at the molecular level.
The attractive forces that occur end up creating, with a single injection, an “intra-cartilage drug depot” that can deliver drugs to a site in the body over weeks or months, instead of a few days.
“When we inject them into rat and rabbit joints, we’ve shown in multiple papers that very quickly, before they get cleared out from the joint space, they go into the tissue,” Bajpayee says. “They can enable 200 to 400 times higher uptake into the tissue.”
She has applied this method to aiding in the regeneration and repair of cartilage and administering pain relief, But her lab has also expanded the same concept to other negatively charged tissues, including in the gastrointestinal, spine and eye, to help mitigate degenerative diseases.
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Whereas Ebong’s previous research examined blood flow as a mechanobiological force, the work for which she was awarded examined the impact of solid forces exerted by tissue in the blood vessel wall.
“Maybe in normal conditions, one has compliant and flexible blood vessels and in hypertension, for example, they’re a little bit stiffer,” Ebong says. “That can make one more prone to disease. So, as engineers we developed cell culture-based models that allow us to expose cells that are isolated from human donors in an experimental setting where we’re able to expose them to a combination of the flow force as well as the solid force that is derived from the tissue stiffness.”
By studying how these forces can gradually degrade the glycocalyx, the protective gel-like layer that coats endothelial cells, Ebong is working to unlock a new understanding of these internal mechanics. Her findings are already being applied to develop new therapies and drug delivery tools that will prevent or reverse diseases. She is hopeful about expanding her work in new directions that could change the lives of people who suffer from a variety of diseases.
“We’re really looking forward to, in the future, doing more of this for a variety of diseases, either those that are core cardiovascular diseases like heart disease or those that occur when something goes wrong with the blood vessel system, like cancer metastasis,” Ebong says. “Metastasizing cells depend on the integrity of the blood vessels. If the blood vessels are weak, they can leak out and go to secondary tissues. Or in the brain, if there’s an issue, like if you have leaky blood vessels, you can end up having neurodegeneration.”
For both Bajpayee and Ebong, the work itself is only as rewarding as its impact, and while awards are nice enough, seeing how their work is used out in the world is the real prize.
“I wouldn’t want to do something that wasn’t valuable,” Ebong says. “Part of the reason I came to a place like Northeastern is the philosophy that what we do is use-inspired, that somebody’s going to use what we do. All I can say is: Mission accomplished.”
The federal government’s highest honors for early-career scientists and engineers are called Presidential Early Career Awards.
Bajpayee and Ebong were among 400 recipients honored by former President Joe Biden before he left office in January.
The awards are meant to recognize “the innovative and far-reaching developments in science and technology” that are leaving an impact on society, according to a statement.
“An award like this is a testament to the creativity of my lab, the hard work of the students, the mentors I’ve been lucky to have in my life because of who I am and where I am and my family,” Bajpayee says. “It is a recognition, which feels great, but in the end it’s all about the journey and I’ve really enjoyed the journey.”