Biomolecular Engineering

APPLICATIONS

Human disease: design and engineering of therapeutic antibodies and proteins, cell and tissue engineering, delivery of vaccines and therapeutics, discovery of cancer targets, treatment of brain tumors.

Fundamental processes of living systems: artificial trees, bioseparations, cell-cell and virus-cell interactions, cellular and subcellular organization, protein biogenesis, regulation and control of networks.

DeLisa’s group studies engineered antibodies created using the cell’s natural protein folding quality control mechanisms

THE ROLE OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERS

The advent of molecular biology, genomics, proteomics, and related technology has spawned a revolution in biology and offers numerous opportunities for new commercial developments. Increasingly, the biotechnology industry is turning to chemical engineers to bring promising research to market. To bridge this gap, a subset of chemical engineering known as biomolecular engineering has emerged that reflects the interface between biology and chemical engineering. Biomolecular engineering focuses on the molecular length scale, and seeks to convert molecular-level knowledge of biological phenomena into potentially useful biochemical and chemical products and processes that are derived from living cells or their components. Further, biomolecular engineers are adept at integrating descriptions of molecular-level events into a systems-level understanding of complex biological systems and at creating the next generation of tools necessary for rapid, accurate and cost-effective analysis of biomolecules.

Armed with this training, faculty members at Cornell are transforming the basic insights from an emerging understanding of biology into useful processes, diagnostics, therapies, and devices that will be of broad benefit to human kind. For instance, we are creating new medicines and systems for their delivery, building artificial proteins, tissues, organs and whole organisms, engineering “super-organisms” that produce human drugs, manufacture biofuels or degrade harmful or toxic wastes, developing better analytical and computational tools for understanding and diagnosing human disease and improving our understanding of a myriad of important and fundamental biological processes ranging from the decoration of cellular proteins with a sugary coat, so-called glycosylation, to the fusion of viruses to cell membranes as occurs in the earliest stages of influenza infection.

A series of images of single influenza virus particle (white) fusing to an artificial cell membrane (black).

Using fluorescence microscopy, the Daniel group can track an individual virus particle binding to, and fusing with, a cell membrane.

TYPICAL PROJECTS

• Studying the fusion of viruses to cell membranes to understand and prevent influenza infection, to develop drug delivery strategies that mimic viral entry, and as a patterning technique to interface biological species with inorganic substrates for sensor development.
• Employing microfluidic devices for separating and aggregating membrane-bound species that will aid in studying transmembrane proteins and membrane biophysics.
• Merging cell culture with microfabrication technologies to create "lab-on-a-chip" analogue devices that mimic the human body or biomaterials that exploit microfluidic structure as a vascular system for applications in tissue engineering and wound healing.
• Developing detailed mechanistic mathematical models of cellular differentiation and proliferation to unlock the mysteries of stem cell biology as well as many cancers and cardiovascular disorders.

Click here to see faculty involved in this area.