May 3, 2011 (11am): Seminar with Sylvain Martel

Abstract:
In recent years, medical robotics have evolved from interventions being performed by large robots outside the patient to smaller untethered versions such as the camera pills capable of travelling through the digestive track. More recently, nanotechnology and robotics were combined to develop new interventional platforms designed to navigate therapeutic carriers capable of targeting regions in the human body such as tumors only accessible through smaller diameter blood vessels. These new navigable therapeutic agents could play a major role in cancer therapy by enhancing therapeutic efficacy by delivering an improved concentration of the drug at the targeted area while decreasing systemic side effects compared to modern interventions such as chemotherapy. The talk will begin with one example of such navigable agents that was successfully synthesized and which has been referred to as Therapeutic Magnetic Micro-Carriers (TMMC). TMMC are biodegradable polymer encapsulating magnetic nanoparticles and a therapeutic load. The nanoparticles are used not only to navigate the carriers in the blood vessels using an upgraded clinical Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner but allow them to be visible using the same scanner. Recent in vivo experiments validated the potential of TMMC in interventions such as liver chemoembolization where the cancer drugs carried by the TMMC were successfully released after targeting the left or right liver lobes of rabbits. Then another type of navigable agents designed to deliver therapeutic loads to colorectal tumors will be presented. They consist of drug-loaded MC-1 magnetotactic bacteria that can be controlled by an external computer and being visible deep in the body using MRI. Then, examples with videos will show the possibility of integrating these two complementary agents in order to increase the range of cancers that could be treated by such new approach based on targeted delivery of navigable therapeutics.

Biographical sketch:
Sylvain Martel received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from McGill University, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Montréal, Canada, in 1997. Following postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was appointed Research Scientist at the BioInstrumentation Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. From Feb. 2001 to Sept. 2004, he had dual appointments at MIT and as Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at École Polytechnique de Montréal (EPM), Campus of the University of Montréal, Montréal, Canada. He is currently Professor in the Department of Computer and Software Engineering, and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, and Director of the NanoRobotics Laboratory at EPM that he founded in 2002. Dr. Martel holds the Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Micro/Nanosystem Development, Fabrication and Validation since 2001 and he is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. In the medical field alone, he pioneered several innovative technologies such as the first parallel computing platform for remote surgeries, direct cardiac mapping systems designed to investigate the cause of sudden cardiac deaths, and new brain implants for decoding neuronal activities in the motor cortex. Presently, Dr. Martel is leading an interdisciplinary team involved in the development of new types of therapeutic agents and interventional platforms for cancer therapy.