CBE/BME 298: Traumatic Brain Injury: Tissue Cavitation and Astrocyte Response

Abstract: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an established risk factor for developing neurodegenerative disease. However, how TBI leads from acute injury to chronic neurodegeneration is limited to post-mortem models. There is a lack of connection between in vitro and in vivo TBI models that can relate injury forces to both macroscale tissue damage and brain function at the cellular level. Needle-induced cavitation (NIC) is a technique that can produce small cavitation bubbles in soft tissues, which allows us to relate small strains and strain rates in living tissue to ensuing acute and chronic cell death, tissue damage and tissue remodeling. In our lab we have applied NIC to quantify the mechanical properties of soft materials and tissues (e.g. brain) to quantify the forces necessary to damage brain tissue and lead to TBI, and most recently combined NIC with patch-clamp electrophysiology to demonstrate that NIC dynamically alters synaptic release onto CA1 pyramidal neurons in a cannabinoid 1 receptor (CB1R)-dependent manner. In this seminar I’ll discuss how this work lays the groundwork for advanced approaches in understanding how TBI impacts neural function at the cellular level, and the development of treatments that promote neural repair in response to brain injury.

Bio: Shelly Peyton is professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University. She received her bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Northwestern University in 2002 and went on to obtain her master's degree and doctorate in chemical engineering from UC Irvine in 2007. She was then an NIH Kirschstein post-doctoral fellow in the Biological Engineering Department at MIT before starting her academic appointment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2011. She then moved to Tufts University in 2024. Peyton leads an interdisciplinary group of engineers and molecular cell biologists seeking to create and apply novel biomaterials platforms toward new solutions to grand challenges in human health. Her lab’s unique approach is using an engineering expertise to build simplified models of human tissue with synthetic biomaterials. They use these systems to understand 1) the physical relationship between metastatic breast cancer cells and the tissues to which they spread, 2) the role of the extracellular matrix and its dynamics in drug resistance, and 3) how to create bioinspired, mechanically dynamic and activatable biomaterials. Among other honors for her work, Peyton was a 2013 Pew Biomedical Scholar, received a New Innovator Award from the NIH, and was awarded a CAREER grant from the NSF. Peyton is a fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. She is passionate about graduate student training and diversifying the academy. She was awarded an Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Engineering at UMass in 2018, has led an REU Site, co-directed a Biotechnology (BTP) NIH T32 training program, and was lead PI of a PREP program at UMass, which hosts students from historically excluded groups for a one-year research-intensive program to help prepare them for graduate school. She also runs an NSF-funded program called Engineering the Cell, which brings female high school students to her lab for five weeks every summer.