Jimenez, Hao earn Rainin Foundation Innovator Award for work on new treatments for inflammatory bowel diseases
By Patrick L. Kennedy
With a proposal to develop smart microbial therapies to treat inflammatory bowel diseases, a team of Boston University researchers has landed an Innovator Award from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. Assistant Professor Miguel Jimenez (BME, MSE), Assistant Professor Liang Hao (BME), and their doctoral students will receive at least $200,000 over one year to create a next-generation microbial therapy, taken in pill form, that would target inflammation without causing harmful side effects.
As many as 3.1 million Americans suffer from inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) such as Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis. Symptoms can include severe diarrhea, fatigue, and malnutrition. Worse, IBD heightens the risk of colon cancer.
Currently, these chronic conditions are treated with expensive drugs that suppress the immune system. “Scientists have shown that engineered bacteria can help reduce inflammation in the gut, but most of these therapies were designed in lab conditions that do not reflect the real environment inside the body,” says Jimenez. “As a result, they often fail to work in animals or people.”
Labs converge on solution
Jimenez, who previously developed an ingestible gastrointestinal tract monitor, runs a lab that creates microbial devices. Encompassing expertise in biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering, his team combines genetically engineered cells with electronic and mechanical components to make chemical sensors and actuators.
Hao’s lab focuses on in vivo disease probes. With a mission to realize the promise of precision medicine, her team develops molecular and cellular tools responsive to biochemical cues in a specific tissue microenvironment to track and control diseases in intact organisms.
With the Rainin project, the first-ever collaboration between these two labs, Jimenez and Hao are taking a new approach to IBD by building and testing genetic tools directly in animal models of intestinal inflammation. Jimenez says the team will work with a well-studied probiotic strain that is safe in humans and engineer it to sense disease conditions and deliver therapeutic proteins at the site of inflammation.
“I have experience developing a pill that can detect inflammation, but this is a brand-new idea on the therapy side,” says Jimenez. “We’re just at the dawn of microbial therapeutics.”
Potential applications to other diseases
Beyond the one-year, $200,000 layout, Innovator Award recipients are eligible for further funding, based on their progress. “The research funded by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation brings us closer to safer, more effective treatments for patients living with difficult gut diseases,” says Jimenez.
Down the road, the team hopes their methods will find applications beyond IBD. “This program will allow us to establish the platform, hit the ground running, and attack different types of diseases,” says Jimenez. “In a few years, we should have the expertise in moving this from bench to bedside, so to speak, and might be interested in starting companies. But first, of course, we have to test this in IBD and see what the science tells us.”
This Innovator Award is the first grant that BU has received from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, which supports IBD research nationally as well as the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area and early childhood education in Oakland.