ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ bioengineers have discovered a potentially faster way to deliver a topical drug that protects women from contracting HIV. Their method spins the drug into silk-like fibers that quickly dissolve when in contact with moisture, releasing higher doses of the drug than possible with other topical materials such as gels or creams.

“This could offer women a potentially more effective, discreet way to protect themselves from HIV infection by inserting the drug-loaded materials into the vagina before sex,” said Cameron Ball, a UW doctoral student in bioengineering and lead author on a in the August issue of .

The UW team, led by bioengineering assistant professor , previously found that to release drugs. These new results build upon that research, showing that the fiber materials can hold 10 times the concentration of medicine as anti-HIV gels currently under development.

Oral pills are used in the U.S. for people who are considered at risk for HIV infection, and topical medications in the form of gels and films are just starting to be developed. These products would be placed inside the vagina before sexual intercourse, allowing the drug to dissolve and diffuse into the surrounding tissue. Called microbicides, the drugs must be given as a large dose to be effective minutes before sex.

But these topical drugs haven’t done well in clinical trials, partly because they aren’t always easy for women to use. Drugs in film form take at least 15 minutes to fully dissolve in the body, and the volume of gels must be large enough to deliver a full dose but small enough to prevent leakage. These factors can make microbicides difficult for a woman to use before sex, researchers said.

“The effectiveness of an anti-HIV topical drug depends partially on high-enough dosages and quick release,” Ball said. “We have achieved higher drug loading in our material such that you wouldn’t need to insert a large amount of these fibers to deliver enough of the drug to be helpful.”

The UW team created the soft fibers using a process called . They first dissolved a polymer and combined it with a drug, maraviroc, and other agents often used in pharmaceuticals that help a material become more water soluble and dissolve quicker. Maraviroc currently is used to treat symptoms of HIV for people who already have the virus.

The syrupy substance is then charged with a high-voltage generator and passed through a syringe. The electric charge on the substance’s surface causes it to form a long string from the syringe, where it whips around – or spins – before collecting on an electrically grounded surface. A palm-sized swatch of the fabric takes about five minutes to make.

Anti-HIV drugs such as maraviroc can take a while to dissolve, so the researchers looked at different ingredients for the fiber that would allow for the highest concentration of drug with the fastest-possible release in the body. Because the electrically spun fibers have a large surface area, researchers were able to create samples in which nearly 30 percent of the mass was composed of the drug itself. In topical gels, the drug makes up only about 3 percent of the total mass.

By adjusting the ingredients in the fibers, researchers were able to dissolve the drug in about six minutes, no matter how much drug mass was in the fiber.

The research team says the soft, dissolving fibers could be rolled into a cardboard tampon applicator for insertion or built into the shape of a vaginal ring, similar to those used for contraception. The material can accommodate different anti-HIV drugs and the team is testing several others for effectiveness.

“We think the fiber platform technology has the capability of being developed into multifunctional medical fabrics that address simultaneously challenges related to biological efficacy and user preferences,” Woodrow said.

Researchers are currently focused on developing prototypes based on user guidance that can be tested for safety and efficacy in animal models.

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

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For more information, contact Ball at cameron.s.ball@gmail.com and Woodrow at woodrow@uw.edu.

Grant numbers: NIH AI098648, NIH P41 EB-002027.

But each graduate has a story about arriving at the university, balancing challenging academics and activities and looking forward to life after graduation. UW Today offers these profiles as a sample.

Bioengineering graduate worked on HIV vaccine, now headed to NIH

Hunter Bennett’s high school diploma was only several months old when he walked into the ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ bioengineering lab of Kim Woodrow nearly four years ago, looking for research opportunities. The new freshman was eager to work in a bioengineering lab, and he wasted little time in carving out a spot with the research team that’s creating biomaterials to fight infections and build immunity.

Now a graduating senior, Bennett was chosen to carry a College of Engineering banner at Commencement. He also the college’s 2014 Dean’s Medal for Academic Excellence. The Bellingham, Washington, native will begin a post-baccalaureate training program after graduation with the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Institutes of Health.

Bennett’s four years of coursework at the UW was coupled with extensive work in Woodrow’s lab, often 20 hours each week. He said this experience allowed him to work closely with faculty members and complement what he was learning in the classroom. In the lab he examined bio-polymer methods for delivering genetically modified cells that could stimulate a protective immune response to HIV.

“Faculty members want to see undergraduate students succeed,” Bennett said. “If you’re motivated, you can go out and find research opportunities here. So I went for it.”

While at the UW, Bennett earned the Levinson Emerging Scholars Program award and served in the Amgen Scholars Program in a University of California, Los Angeles, bioengineering lab for a summer. He also received the Washington Scholars award, the Bioengineering Department Scholar award and a Washington Research Foundation Fellowship award, among other honors. He served as vice president of Bioengineers Without Borders where he helped to design a smartphone-compatible diagnostic test.

Bennett plans to attend medical school and complete his doctorate in a dual-degree program. He’s interested in how patients relate to medicine, and he hopes to change perceptions of the field and make it more relatable for people.

School of Law graduate moves from war zone to courtroom

A good litigator, like a good soldier, tries to be prepared for what lies ahead. Lance Pelletier knows this, and credits his military experience with helping to clarify for him that the law would be his chosen profession.

Pelletier, 30, is graduating from the UW School of Law with a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree. A decorated veteran, he served the United States Army with distinction in the Joint Border Coordination Center in Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border. Initially commissioned as a lieutenant, Pelletier exited the military with the rank of captain.

He said his service showed him the value of understanding a situation from the details to the larger, often dangerous realities: “One of the things I learned as an officer was the importance of procedure and how that enables effective decision making.”

He said, “We were trying to build things that had never been built before — trying to freely share intelligence and information, to build a network of trust and a functional border infrastructure for two countries that never really had one before.”

Pelletier graduated from DePaul University in 2006 with a bachelor of arts in English and high honors and was named Most Outstanding ROTC Cadet one year as well as president of DePaul’s Honors Program.

He graduated from the U.S. Army Field Artillery School the following year and was assigned to Fort Lewis, Washington. In 2011, after completing his tour of duty, Pelletier returned to DePaul for law school.

He transferred to the UW in 2012. He participated in mock trial competitions and was invited into the Order of the Barristers, the law school’s highest award for mock trial and moot court participation. Pelletier also reinstated the UW chapter of Phi Alpha Delta, the nation’s largest legal fraternity.

He plans to study for the bar next, after which he will work as a clerk for Washington state Supreme Court Justice .

With five and a half years of active duty following four years of college ROTC training, Pelletier said, he is at home with moving around frequently and taking opportunities as they come up.

“It gives you flexibility to seek new challenges,” he said. “I am not intimidated by moving, or starting over.”

English graduate aims to make literary canon more diverse

Shangé Purnell always wanted to go to college. She had many reasons, but one in particular stood out.

“When I was little my mom used to tell the story that if she and my dad had graduated from college we would have lived in a house with a swimming pool. So that was always in the back of my mind, that someday I wanted to have a swimming pool,” Purnell said.

The English major will be the first in her family to graduate from college and was chosen to carry a College of Arts & Sciences banner at Commencement.

Purnell, who grew up in Everett and Mukilteo, Washington, hopes to eventually obtain a doctorate in English literature and theory and teach at the college level, with the goal of helping to increase diversity of the traditional body of literary works.

“The highbrow elite have set what is highbrow literature – Shakespeare and other mostly white European authors,” Purnell said. “We’re starting to get more diversity, but it’s still very narrow, it’s still a Eurocentric perspective. I realize that being a U.S. citizen I have been conditioned to have a Eurocentric view, but I’d like to give view to the people of color in this world.”

Purnell has spent much of her college career pushing for more diversity at the UW, as an officer in the during her sophomore year, and a member of the Students for Diversity Coalition, which successfully convinced the university to implement a diversity credit requirement.

Last year she spent one quarter studying in London, then a month studying and working in Ghana, where she taught English and math to 9- to 13-year-olds. She tried to see that world with fresh eyes.

“It was like what you see on the Save the Children commercials, but with a different narrative,” she explained. “They were living their lives; they weren’t just slaves to the past, or slaves to their poverty. We tried to look at it from not just a Western perspective.”

MEDEX Northwest graduate inspired by Army medic duties, childhood difficulties

Dustin Golding and his Kennewick, Washington, family had a hardscrabble life. Dustin’s construction-worker father would suture his own job-site wounds with household needle and thread. Mindful of such rudimentary medicine and lacking money for college, Dustin joined the U.S. Army and became a medic.

In eight years of service, he was deployed twice to Afghanistan and once to Iraq, increasingly in a lead position. As a medical platoon sergeant, Golding commanded more than 20 medics and multiple aid stations. His final mission also enabled him to interact closely with civilians at a free clinic set up by the post, an experience he relished.

He left the military with medical skills and a desire, after three deployments, to be on a relatively shorter timeline to a civilian career and family life. So he pursued physician-assistant training in the UW’s MEDEX Northwest two-year program, which he graduates from this month.

Now 29, Golding has resettled in Kennewick with his wife and two young sons.

“Commitment to service – to the nation, to the community – has continued to build for me,” he said. “I like my community and I want to see its healthcare improve. I help at a free clinic here, Grace Clinic, where there’s a need for providers. I’m young and learning and growing, and I’d like to develop my skills and leadership to become an advocate for people and providers here.”

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A ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ team has developed a versatile platform to simultaneously offer contraception and prevent HIV. Electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers can dissolve to release drugs, providing a platform for cheap, discrete and reversible protection.

The research was published this week in the Public Library of Science’s open-access journal . The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last month awarded the UW researchers almost $1 million to pursue the technology.

“Our dream is to create a product women can use to protect themselves from HIV infection and unintended pregnancy,” said corresponding author , a UW assistant professor of bioengineering. “We have the drugs to do that. It’s really about delivering them in a way that makes them more potent, and allows a woman to want to use it.”

uses an electric field to catapult a charged fluid jet through air to create very fine, nanometer-scale fibers. The fibers can be manipulated to control the material’s solubility, strength and even geometry. Because of this versatility, fibers may be better at delivering medicine than existing technologies such as gels, tablets or pills. No high temperatures are involved, so the method is suitable for heat-sensitive molecules. The fabric can also incorporate large molecules, such as proteins and antibodies, that are hard to deliver through other methods.

At a lab meeting last year, Woodrow presented the concept, and co-authors Emily Krogstad and Cameron Ball, both first-year graduate students, pursued the idea.

They first dissolved polymers approved by the Food and Drug Administration and antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV to create a gooey solution that passes through a syringe. As the stream encounters the electric field it stretches to create thin fibers measuring 100 to several thousand nanometers that whip through the air and eventually stick to a collecting plate (one nanometer is about one 25-millionth of an inch). The final material is a stretchy fabric that can physically block sperm or release chemical contraceptives and antivirals.

“This method allows controlled release of multiple compounds,” Ball said. “We were able to tune the fibers to have different release properties.”

One of the fabrics they made dissolves within minutes, potentially offering users immediate, discrete protection against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Another dissolves gradually over a few days, providing an option for sustained delivery, more like the birth-control pill,  to provide contraception and guard against HIV.

The fabric could incorporate many fibers to guard against many different sexually transmitted infections, or include more than one anti-HIV drug to protect against drug-resistant strains (and discourage drug-resistant strains from emerging). Mixed fibers could be designed to release drugs at different times to increase their potency, like the prime-boost method used in vaccines.

The electrospun cloth could be inserted directly in the body or be used as a coating on vaginal rings or other products.

Electrospinning has existed for decades, but it’s only recently been automated to make it practical for applications such as filtration and tissue engineering. This is the first study to use nanofibers for vaginal drug delivery.

While this technology is more discrete than a condom, and potentially more versatile than pills or plastic or rubber devices, researchers say there is no single right answer.

“At the time of sex, are people going to actually use it? That’s where having multiple options really comes into play,” Krogstad said. “Depending on cultural background and personal preferences, certain populations may differ in terms of what form of technology makes the most sense for them.”

The team is focusing on places like Africa where HIV is most common, but the technology could be used in the U.S. or other countries to offer birth control while also preventing one or more sexually transmitted diseases.

The research to date was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the UW’s . The other co-author on the paper is Thanyanan Chaowanachan, a UW postdoctoral researcher and longtime HIV expert.

The team will use the new Gates Foundation grant to evaluate the versatility and feasibility of their system. The group will hire more research staff and buy an electrospinning machine to make butcher-paper sized sheets. The expanded team will spend a year testing combinations that deliver two antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV and a hormonal contraceptive, and then six months scaling up production of the most promising materials.

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For more information, contact Woodrow at 206-685-6831 or woodrow@uw.edu.