Nisarg Shah
Assistant Professor of Nanoengineering and Chemical Engineering Program
University of California, San Diego
Seminar Information
The recognition of self from non-self is an essential quality of the immune system that confers protective immunity against pathogens while suppressing activation against self-antigens. Autoimmune diseases are attributed, at least in part, to a deficiency in the regulatory capacity of the immune system. Analysis of immunophenotypic trajectories of disease participating immune cell subsets suggests that a shared hallmark of autoimmune disorders is an upregulation of pro-inflammatory mediators, often accompanied by a deficiency in the number and function of regulatory immune cells. Our group is developing cell-instructive biomaterials that are organized to function as chemical and molecular regulators to drive immune cell specificities towards restoring the function of negative feedback. Through biomaterials-mediated epigenetic and metabolic regulation, we show how the immunosuppressive function of immune cell subsets might be restored. By designing biomaterials mimicking key features of lymphoid organs in vivo, we show that key immune cell subsets are produced to alleviate the effects of autoimmunity arising from immunodeficiency. Materials design grounded in biological phenomena will be explored and the impact on regulation of cell behavior for building immunity will be discussed.
Nisarg Shah is a faculty member in the Department of Nanoengineering and Chemical Engineering program at UC San Diego. Dr. Shah’s research interests are in the design and synthesis of materials that regulate the fate of cells resident in tissues by providing cell-instructive cues to control spatiotemporal cellular behavior. Dr. Shah was previously a Cancer Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wyss Institute and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and obtained his doctoral degree from MIT and Bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in Chemical Engineering.