Invited Academic Seminar Series – Rahima Benhabbour

Abstract:

Long-acting drug delivery systems (DDSs) can address significant unmet health needs to improve patient compliance and therapeutic outcomes. These DDSs can be designed for treatment, prevention, or as multipurpose prevention technologies.

Preventing HIV infections and unintended pregnancies is a leading public health priority for women’s health. Multipurpose prevention technologies (MPTs) capable of delivering long-acting (LA) contraception and HIV prevention are needed. The Benhabbour lab has been leading the development of three innovative technologies all aiming to address current gaps and unmet needs to accelerate translation of an effective MPT to clinical studies. To that extent, we combine state-of-the-art engineering tools, formulation development, preclinical animal models, and pharmacology models to design and engineer the next generation LA MPTs for the prevention of HIV, other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and unintended pregnancy. 

Our lab has also focused on addressing critical unmet treatment needs for cancers and regenerative medicine to design novel cell-laden scaffolds for LA delivery of cell therapies.

In this seminar, I will highlight the three large programs that we currently lead on engineering the next generation MPTs and cell-laden scaffolds, which include 1) an ultra-long-acting injectable formulation for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) (NIAID R01AI131430) and first-in-line LA injectable MPT (NIAID R01AI162246); 2) a first-in-line 3D printed intravaginal ring MPT (NIAID R61AI136002; NIAID R01 AI150358); and 3) a novel cell-laden hydrogel scaffold for treatment of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) (NCI 1R01CA286609). This seminar will highlight preclinical results in various animal models (mouse, sheep, macaques) to assess safety, pharmacokinetics, and efficacy of these technologies and discuss their current stage of development and future directions.