Building bespoke artificial cells to investigate how environmental nanoplastics affect human cell membranes
10 June - 21 July 2024
Biography
Dr Katherine Elvira is the Canada Research Chair in Microfluidics for Drug Discovery and Health Care, a national award given to “exceptional emerging researchers, acknowledged by their peers as having the potential to lead in their field”. Dr Elvira is also a Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar in partnership with the Canadians for Leading Edge Alzheimer Research (CLEAR) Foundation, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Victoria, Canada. In 2023 she was awarded the Gilead Award for Excellence in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion by the Chemical Institute of Canada.
Dr Elvira leads an internationally recognised research program at the interface of analytical chemistry and cell biology. Her group develops microfluidic (lab-on-a-chip) technologies to build bespoke artificial cells and tissues for drug discovery and development applications. She has been invited to publish her ideas about the future of her research fields in some of the most prestigious journals in the chemical sciences. This includes perspectives in Nature Chemistry and Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, as well as being invited to publish her research in some of the most well-known journals in the fields of microfluidic technologies and pharmaceutical sciences. She has given over 60 seminars worldwide over the last 6 years, 7 of which have been keynotes and 49 of which have been invited. This includes invited presentations at the Gordon Research Conference on Drug Metabolism, at Harvard Medical School and at the Mayo Clinic. Dr Elvira has over 20 media articles and interviews related to her research.
Project Summary
There is currently heightened public interest in the impact of plastics on the environment, and how they degrade to create micro/nano plastics that can potentially harm human health. The aim of this project is to start a collaboration between two disparate research fields to answer questions about how nanoplastics interact with (and potentially damage) human cells.
Although it is well-known that particles from plastic waste are found in all organs of the human body, including the placenta and the bloodstream, little is known about how they affect human cell membranes. Cell membranes play a crucial role in choreographing interactions between a cell and the outside environment, for example by allowing or prohibiting the access of drugs from the cell exterior to the cell interior. Learning how plastics disrupt this protective barrier may allow us to understand whether nanoplastics affect human health.
Dr Elvira has pioneered using droplet interface bilayers (DIBs, a type of bespoke artificial cell membrane) in microfluidic devices to build bespoke artificial cells that mimic human cell membranes. Dr Lloyd has developed innovative analytical methods for detecting and tracing chemicals, including those derived from plastics. These include FTIR-microscopy for optical detection and molecular chemical analysis via high-resolution mass spectrometry combined with state-of-the-art stable isotope probing techniques. Together, they will explore the interactions between cell membranes and nanoplastics.
During her stay at the University of Bristol, Dr Elvira will give a public lecture about her research, explaining how microfluidic technologies can be designed to build customisable artificial cells that help predict the behaviour of drugs in the human body. She will also give a lecture about equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in academia. Dr Elvira will talk about the work she has done throughout her career to champion EDI in science, and how the values of EDI affect scientific output and research impact.
Details of Dr Elvira's lectures and seminars will be posted on the Events page in due course, in the meantime please contact Dr Elvira's host, Dr Charlotte Lloyd, for further information.
