 Do zwitterions protect implants?Lauren Jansen and Thuy Nguyen from the Peyton lab led a collaborative project with the Bryant (Colorado), Liu (UC-Irvine), and Emrick (UMass) groups to determine if adding zwitterions to PEG gels helped shield them from the immune system. The answer is *sometimes*. Read more in their report in Biomacromolecules! |  Controlling the Michael ReactionLauren Jansen, Lenny Negron-Piniero, and Sualyneth Galarza collaborated to find ways to slow down the kinetics of the Michael-addition reaction in PEG-maleimide hydrogels. Their work was recently published in Acta Biomaterialia |  New dynamic gelsYen Tran recently led an effort, with collaborators John Klier and Todd Emrick at UMass, to create new gel networks that stiffen under strain. These gels rely on "cryptic" reactive groups, which are only strain-responsive when externally activated. This work was recently published in Soft Matter and can be found on ArXiv. |
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 Mechanics of Bone MarrowWe collaborated with the Crosby lab in PSE to quantify the stiffness of bone marrow. Lauren Jansen led this project and used three distinct, but complimentary techniques: rheology, indentation, and cavitation, to obtain both bulk and microscale measurements with the least destructive possible methods. She published this work in the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials. |  Smooth muscle cell stiffness sensingWill Herrick published his research on how smooth muscle cells sense and respond to stiffness in the CMBE journal. He found that soluble factors from culture medium and integrin-binding motifs dictated the extent to which these cells responded to stiffness changes. This article is part of their "Young Innovator" series, highlighted at the BMES fall meeting 2015. This work was supported by an AHA Grant-In-Aid. |  Predicting metastasisLauren Barney has created biomaterial mimics of bone, brain, and lung tissue. She is using these materials, with support from an NSF-NCI PESO grant (DMR-1234852), to predict what interactions between cancer cells and materials cause secondary tissue site specificity. |
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 3D Synthetic Tissue MimicsLauren Jansen has built 3D materials made from synthetic polymer precursors that capture key elements of bone marrow. She is using this bone marrow mimic to better understand the impact of stem cells, matrix remodeling, and chemo-mechanics on breast cancer metastasis. This work is funded by the Pew Foundation. |  Institutes at UMass Support Us!The Peyton Lab is supported by several institutes at UMass Amherst, including the UMass MRSEC on Polymers (Seed Grant 2012-2014), the ICE Institute for Cellular Engineering (Will Herrick IGERT fellowship from 2011-13), and the NIH funded Chemistry-Biology Interface (Lauren Barney 2014-2015. Thank you to these institutes! |  Smooth Muscle Cell Stiffness SensingThe Peyton lab was awarded a Grant-in-Aid award, starting July of 2013, to use our hydrophilic gels to study how atherosclerosis progression is accelerated by arterial stiffening, macrophage release of cytokines, and smooth muscle cell invasion. William Herrick is leading this effort. |
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