Her lab’s research, with a central focus on women’s health, is aimed at developing stimuli-responsive biomaterials for metabolic disorders in women.
Some of these disorders, being chronic, are considered subjects of “management” and do not have a directed therapy in place.
Through her lab’s research, her team is involved in strategically functionalizing natural polysaccharides to add target-specific therapeutic effects, while retaining their basic properties of forming hydrogels for entrapment and slow release.
They also derivatize metabolically beneficial lipids to generate disease-targeted nutraceuticals which can be further delivered locally using an ECM-mimicking hydrogel implant. Her group’s research on therapeutic tampons, premetastatic hydrogel niches and protein chimeras, has the potential to form industrial collaborations to drive the developed therapeutic hydrogel materials all the way to device design and patient applications.
The above research program the ability to make an immediate impact to the society owing to its translative potential ensuring improved healthcare accessibility for women in our society.
