Melissa Pappas
Kyle Holmberg Vining, DDS, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Preventive and Restorative Sciences at Penn Dental Medicine with a joint appointment in Materials Science and Engineering at Penn Engineering, has been awarded a $2 million Maximizing Investigators Research Award for Early-Stage Investigators grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This award will support his innovative research into the mechanical cues of the extracellular matrix and their role in regulating monocyte inflammation.
Monocytes, a type of immune cell, help the body respond to injury and infection as well as help tissues repair. They originate in bone marrow and move throughout the body to various tissues, where they help shape the inflammatory environment and influence key processes such as tissue regeneration and cancer progression.
“This project stemmed from the collaborative scientific environment at Penn, including colleagues from the Center for Innovation and Precision Dentistry, the Center for Engineering MechanoBiology and the Abramson Cancer Center,” says Vining. “The project focuses on how the physical properties of the extracellular matrix, such as its elasticity and the way it dissipates stress, impact the behavior of monocytes. These properties are especially important in tissues undergoing inflammation or injury, where the matrix behaves like both a solid and a fluid at different scales.”
Building on his lab’s previous work and collaborations across schools, Vining has developed advanced biomaterial systems that mimic the architecture of tissues, using a combination of polysaccharide hydrogels and fibrillar type I collagen. These systems enable him to precisely tune the physical characteristics of the matrix, allowing for a better understanding of how immune cells interact with their surroundings.
The MIRA program provides support for research that falls within the mission of NIGMS, which looks to increase our understanding of biological processes and lay the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention.
“This NIH grant will support continued collaboration across campus and advance my lab’s work on monocyte mechanobiology,” says Vining. “We hope to apply our findings to improve basic science knowledge and develop new treatments for disease, specifically applying mechanobiology findings to improve dendritic cell therapies for treatment of oral cancer.”
Read more about Vining’s work here.