Inventor Profiles

Research area The Bioinspired Materials Lab builds innovative biomaterials to address significant challenges in biology and medicine. Chemists, biologists, materials scientists and engineers collaborate to create new materials termed “bioinspired materials” because they mimic some of the fascinating ways that nature builds materials, from sea shells to human organs. The research group works closely with biologists to make fundamental scientific discoveries and partners with clinicians to create medical devices that can regenerate diseased or damaged tissues. The lab’s goal is to achieve high impact by pursuing groundbreaking discoveries, translating discoveries into new medical treatments and training the next generation of leaders in regenerative medicine.

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What excites you about your work? 

“I’m excited about the area of therapeutic mRNA delivery because our recent studies have shown the technology’s tremendous potential–above and beyond what I would have expected. We’ve focused on tissue regeneration for the last 10 years, and we’ve shown we can promote the regeneration of cartilage, skeletal muscle, skin tissue and significantly injured spinal cords. These demonstrations suggest the approach can be quite broadly applied and might apply across a huge range of diseases and disorders. We’re really excited about its potential. We’ve been developing materials to stabilize mRNA, and I’m excited about applying that in tissue regeneration and infectious disease applications.”

What do you hope to achieve? 

“In so many of these specific applications, we want to get to the first-in-human trials as efficiently as we can and create versions of these technologies that can actually make their way to humans. There are so many ways these approaches can be designed that make them clinically unrealistic, so we need to work with clinicians, companies, business people, etc. to identify paths forward that will bring these things to humans.”

We are excited about the potential uses of the technologies developed in Prof. Murphy’s lab. He is an expert in using mineral coated microparticles to develop biologics such as mRNA to treat different diseases.

– Rafael Diaz, WARF, Licensing Manager