In the “Research Matters” series, we visit labs across campus to hear directly from Stanford scientists about what they’re working on, how it could advance human health and well-being, and why universities are critical players in the nation’s innovation ecosystem. The following are the researcher’s own words, edited and condensed for clarity.
My lab develops technologies to make drugs work better. We design new additives that improve the formulation, stability, and controlled delivery of protein drugs, in particular. If a drug is not in the right place in your body at the right time, it will never work. Sometimes we aim to make drugs work faster, sometimes slower – it depends on what’s needed. For example, we make injectable gels that can hold onto drugs and deliver them as they dissolve away over time – sometimes just for a few weeks and sometimes for a few months.
Engineering is fundamentally about solving problems. I encourage my students to talk to people like clinicians and find out problems they face or the shortcomings of available technologies. Once you see where the problems are, you can propose a solution.
For example, I would never have thought about applying our technology to wildfire prevention until I had a conversation with my brother-in-law, who was formerly the fire prevention forester for the state of Hawaii. He had discovered that most fires in the state start on roadsides and wondered if the standard retardants you see dropped from planes could be sprayed as a preventive measure – but a sales rep for the manufacturer told him it would get washed away too quickly. And that’s when I was like, “Oh, that’s a delivery problem – we absolutely can solve that.”
We also have a lot of projects in my lab that are fundamental research questions on material behavior, such as what is needed for a gel to be easy to make, highly stable, to be easily administered by injection, and to rapidly self-heal once administered so it doesn’t leach any drug initially, but instead slowly delivers it over time.
We couldn’t have made progress on real-world applications without these fundamental studies as well – they absolutely go hand in hand.
It takes a ton of infrastructure to be able to do science, and it’s an investment in the future – that’s fundamentally what it is.”
One of the things I love most is making something that didn’t exist before.
It blows my students’ minds when I tell them that when we are designing new molecules, we are making a piece of matter that has never existed in the history of the universe. We are the first people to ever make this thing that has unprecedented properties that we can use to solve an important problem in a unique way. This type of work is fundamentally creative in this way.
It takes a ton of infrastructure to be able to do science, and it’s an investment in the future – that’s fundamentally what it is. Science is a big, collaborative project, and it requires a critical mass of people with different expertise to come together to think about problems. All of the biggest advancements come from interdisciplinary collaboration.
This is one of the reasons why consistently funding science is really crucial: You never know where things will go. There’s so much serendipity in terms of having the right people, in the right place, at the right time for nucleating new ideas.
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Eric Appel is an associate professor of materials science and engineering, the Lee Otterson Endowed Faculty Scholar, a faculty fellow in the ChEM-H Institute, and a senior fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment.
“Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies 8,180 acres, among the largest in the United States, and enrols over 17,000 students.”
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