Symposium Space: ELSI in Biotechnology

Lynette Hammond Gerido

Lynette Hammond Gerido is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). Prior to joining CWRU, Dr. Gerido Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, funded by the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) program. She received a PhD at Florida State University School of Information, an MPH at Drexel University, and an MBA at George Washington University, where she became immersed in health policy and disparities research. She spent a summer abroad studying public-private partnerships in universal healthcare systems at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil. Dr. Gerido has industry experience in technical program management, software engineering, web development, and visual communications for various federal and academic teams. Dr. Gerido partners with communities in research to inform clinical practice, technological design, and policy. She uses population data to visualize trends in the ethical, legal, and social implications of clinical research, public health campaigns, and consumer health technologies then employs mixed methods to reveal underlying information and communications needs of patients and their families. Her past work explored racial disparities in the uptake of genetic susceptibility testing for hereditary cancers associated with sociocultural barriers to accessing health information, validity of testing results, and access to genetic counseling.

Anirban Sen Gupta

Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Case School of Engineering School of Medicine

Member, Cancer Imaging Program, Case Comprehensive Cancer Center

Research Interests

Our principal research focus is on Drug Delivery and Nanomedicine. It encompasses mechanistic understanding of biological and pathological phenomena at the cellular, sub-cellular and biomolecular levels, and utilizing this knowledge to create bioinspired therapeutic and diagnostic technologies to interrogate, support, or treat the various phenomena. To this end, our laboratory focuses on understanding the complex pathophysiological mechanisms of cardiovascular diseases and cancer, and then on using this insight to develop disease-targeted therapeutic strategies by integrating critical physical, chemical and biological components at nano-to-micro scales.

Our main research interests are in the areas of:

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  Novel biomaterials to modulate biologic interactions and responses

  
  


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  Drug formulation and disease-targeted drug delivery systems

  
  

The physiological and pathological areas we focus on are hemostasis, thrombosis, inflammation, immune response and cancer metastasis. The tools that we use are biochemical properties like disease-relevant heteromultivalent ligand-receptor interactions, integrated with biophysical attributes of biomaterial platforms like shape, size, charge and morphology), to create customizable and translatable targeted drug delivery technologies.