Date of Award
December 2019
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Committee Member
Marc R Birtwistle
Committee Member
Alex Feltus
Committee Member
Mark Blenner
Abstract
Glioblastoma (GBM) remains a highly lethal brain tumor that continues have overall low survival rate, with only 5% of patients to five or more years. This thesis proposes a drug- and polymersome-loaded thermosensitive hydrogel as a therapeutic platform to target and eliminate post-surgical GBM tumor cells. The experiments presented lay some foundational work in establishing the feasibility of and optimizing such a platform. Polyethene glycol (PEG)-Polyester pH-responsive polymersomes were synthesized, optimized and conjugated with peptide ligands to increase cellular uptake in vitro. A Python workflow was designed, using RNAseq data from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Genotype-Tissue Expression project (GTEx) with online proteomic and binding databases, to find GBM cellular surface targets and the ligands that bind them. A biomimetic hydrogel, enhanced by chemotaxis signaling molecules, was synthesized as an alternative tumor eliminating modality. The continuation of this work, merging modern nanomedicine synthesis techniques and disease-specific data analysis promises to have positive implications for GBM patient prognosis.
Recommended Citation
Westfall, Jesse James, "Connecting Polymeric Nanomedicine and Systems Biology: An Innovative Approach to Glioblastoma Treatment" (2019). All Theses. 3197.
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/3197