Timothy O’Shea

My research group is focused on developing new treatments for brain and spinal cord disorders by engineering glia to perform specific reparative functions. Glia are a collection of cells in the brain and spinal cord that interact directly with neurons to ensure healthy nervous system function. In the context of injury, glia are destroyed and are not naturally replenished. In certain disorders, glia dysfunction is the root cause of disease. We are interested in understanding how glia respond in injury and disease using animal models and developing new bioengineering tools to regulate their functions. Our bioengineering toolkit includes biomaterials composed of polymers with supramolecular functionality and tunable physiochemical and biological properties as well as transgenic neural cell lines that we use for transplantation studies and interrogating glia-biomaterial interactions. Current research initiatives include: (i) testing strategies to ‘re-neuralize’ stroke and spinal cord injury lesions by reinstating functional glial frameworks into non-neural lesion cores; (ii) improving the performance of neural implants by regulating the biomaterial-neural interface using glia engineering; and (iii) developing and testing drug delivery strategies to preferentially target therapies to dysfunctional glia responsible for disease.