³ÉÈË´óƬ

With over a thousand failed clinical trials in stroke, inventing a new approach may seem daunting. We wondered if we tried something completely different if it would give us hope to regenerate the brain after a traumatic injury like spinal cord injury or stroke. However, even delivering therapeutics to the brain is non-trivial as the common ways of taking medications orally or intravenously are ineffective at getting into the brain. So, we found a new way to achieve local delivery to the brain by circumventing what is commonly called the blood-brain barrier. With a newly invented, injectable material, we were able to deliver therapeutics directly to the brain and spinal cord and these promoted both tissue and functional repair in models of disease. At the same time, we wondered if we could stop or reverse degeneration of the retina that leads to blindness. For this, we took advantage of the power of stem cells to replace those cells lost due to disease, which led to some vision repair in models of disease.  

Dr. Shoichet is currently a University Professor and Michael E. Charles Chair in Chemical Engineering at the University of Toronto, where her research is focused on drug and cell delivery strategies in the central nervous system (brain, spinal cord, retina) and 3D hydrogel culture systems to model cancer. She is actively engaged in translational research and science outreach.

Join in person or online.