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NEEL JOSHI ’01
using NATURE’S TEMPLATE
Written by DOUG MCINNIS
Neel Joshi ’01 figures it makes no sense to reinvent the wheel, especially one already perfected by nature. So he and his Harvard University team are borrowing from nature in hopes of creating systems that will trigger the body to grow new tissue or enhance cancer-fighting drugs. “We would like to extract the design principles that are
already there in nature,” says Joshi ’01, head of a new research group at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically
Inspired
Engineering and assistant professor in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
The building blocks for these design principles are proteins. Their shape determines their function, so the trick is to copy that shape and then create synthetic copies. But biological mate- rials are so complex that Joshi’s team will try to understand and mimic only small bits of them. “You’re looking at very compli- cated machines that you’re trying to replicate,” says Joshi. “You can’t understand the entire machine. So we will take only one part of it.”
That may be enough, for example, to make cancer-fighting
drugs more effective. “It’s known that chemotherapy has varying levels of efficiency, depending on when it’s administered,” Joshi says. “We might be able to change the body’s chemistry so that a cancer drug is effective a higher percent of the time.” The team is also using synthetic proteins to build implant- able scaffolds that would trigger the body to assemble its own proteins within and around the scaffolding, forming new bone, new tissues and, perhaps, new organs. Another goal is to deliver drugs precisely where they are needed, thus minimizing collateral damage elsewhere in the body. For example, the team might create synthetic proteins that would transport a drug through the bloodstream until it encounters a point where the body is physically stressed. That stress point would activate a bio-chemical switch, prompting the delivery agent to release the drug at precisely that spot.
“We might be able to change the body’s chemistry so that a cancer drug is effective a higher percent- age of the time.”
NEEL JOSHI Joshi grew up in Silicon Valley and chose Harvey Mudd
College over U.C. Berkeley for his undergraduate studies. That choice paid off when he applied to Harvard for a job. “Engi- neering Dean Cherry Murray wanted people who are T-shaped, which means they have depth in a particular field and breadth in terms of what they are able to discuss and who they are able to interact with,” says Joshi.
He says he gained the depth in a Berkeley Ph.D. program.
But HMC gave him the breadth of knowledge that Harvard sought in its researchers. “At Harvey Mudd, I had to take some- thing from each of six core areas of science,” he says. “And a third of my courses had to come from outside of science. I took a wide range of classes, sometimes to the dismay of my parents who saw I was taking courses like ethnomusicology.” Joshi’s unit formed in 2010, and its first research papers
aren’t scheduled for publication until next year. “We’re just in the early stages,” he says. “But it’s our goal to reach the point where we can first use our materials in animals, and then humans. We could team up with Harvard Medical School for the human trials.” If Joshi’s team succeeds, it could herald a sea change in medi-
cal treatment. “The materials currently available for interfacing with the human body are somewhat limited,” he says. “They are based on what is readily available. We want to use the building blocks of natural systems to create synthetics that mimic some of the things that natural systems can do.”
FALL/WINTER 2011 Har vey Mudd College
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