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Background
Cody Schoener is
originally from San Antonio, TX. He
received a B.S in biomedical engineering
from Texas A & M University (College
Station, TX) in the spring of 2007. As
an undergraduate researcher he focused
on the development of novel
inorganic-organic biomaterials for the
use in soft tissue engineering under Dr.
Melissa Grunlan. He continued to work
under the same advisor for his M.S. and
graduated in August 2009. His graduate
studies focused on developing hybrid
shape memory polymers which can be
easily fabricated and transformed into a
variety of applications including shape
memory stents or deployable foams for
aneurysms.
Research Summary
Cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States with roughly over 570,000 deaths a year and overall costs of cancer in 2010 exceeding $260 billion. On the other hand, the 5-year survival rate for all cancers has been steadily increasing primarily due to improvements in patient healthcare, particularly diagnosis of cancer at earlier stages and improvements in treatment. However, these survival rates have come at great sacrifices to the patients including severe side effects during treatment and ballooning financial costs. Therefore, there is a need for further advancements or new treatment regimens which reduces the side effects of current cancer treatment, improves patient compliance, increases patient comfort, and reduces financial costs considerably.
Most cancers are currently treated with surgery and adjuvant treatment of either chemotherapy or radiation. Improvements in imaging techniques have improved radiation administration while surgical procedures have become less invasive through the development of new instruments. However, the advancement of chemotherapeutic administration has remained slow and still depends on intravenous, systemic delivery which causes healthy tissue to be exposed to highly toxic substances. Chemotherapy has progressed through new drug synthesis and targeting mechanisms, but a new route of administration could drastically improve patient care.
Oral delivery is considered the gold standard for patient compliance and comfort for many therapeutic agents. Oral delivery of chemotherapeutic agents is an emerging research field and has shown some promising results when compared to conventional intravenous administration. Designing oral chemotherapeutics to more effectively treat cancer than intravenous treatments could revolutionize the fight against cancer, but a new host of obstacles must be overcome for proper delivery and oblation of the tumor. Intelligent, highly biocompatible polymer carriers can be synthesized to overcome these obstacles and transport chemotherapeutic agents to their proper location.
Our lab is focused on combining the desirable characteristics of pH-sensitive, hydrophilic networks with the hydrophobic thermodynamic behavior of certain homopolymers by synthesizing advanced interpenetrating networks (IPN) that can be used to develop amphiphilic polymer structures for bioapplications. In IPNs, two homopolymers or copolymers are physically entangled within one another, but are not chemically bound; this allows the combinatorial expression of properties from each individual polymer network.
In our studies, we are synthesizing and characterizing sequential IPNs composed of a pH-responsive, hydrophilic polymer, P(MAA-g-EG), prepared from methacrylic acid (MAA) grafted with poly(ethylene glycol) tethers, and hydrophobic poly(n-butyl acrylate) (PBA). It is possible these IPNs may serve as viable oral carriers for chemotherapeutic agents which may improve patient care and comfort and reduce healthcare costs.
Publications
Schoener, C.A., Hutson, H.N., Fletcher, G.K., Peppas, N.A.
"Amphiphilic Interpenetrating Networks for the Delivery of Hydrophobic, Low Molecular Weight Therapeutic Agents"
,
Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 2011 (submitted). Schoener, C.A.,
Weyand, C.B., Murthy, R. "Shape Memory
polymers with silicon-containing
segments"
,
J. Mater. Chem., 2010, 20, 1787.
Hou, Y., Schoener, C.A.,
Regan, K.R., Munoz-Pinto, D., Hahn,
M.S., Grunlan, M.A. "Photocrosslinked
PDMSstar-PEG Hydrogels: Synthesis,
Characterization, and Potential
Application for Tissue Engineering
Scaffolds",
Biomacromolecules, 2010, 11, 648.
Xin, Q., Bulick, A., Schoener, C.A.,
Munoz, D., Hou, Y., Grunlan, M.A., Hahn,
M.S. "Modulating smooth muscle cell
response with novel tunable
inorganic-organic hydrogels"
,
Polym. Mater. Sci. Eng., 2008, 98, 328. |
