Faculty Focus: Minglin Ma

Sometimes the best things really do come in small packages. Minglin Ma, a new assistant professor of biological and environmental engineering, is hoping to package cells in novel ways to provide new therapies for diseases like Type 1 diabetes and cancer. In Type 1 diabetes, for example, the body’s immune system reacts against the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas, and eventually the cells stop producing insulin. Current therapies include invasive daily insulin injections or pancreatic islet transplants, which require a human donor and potentially dangerous immunosuppression. Furthermore, they do not cure the underlying problem, nor many of its long-term symptoms, such as blindness. Ma is designing materials that could be used to package healthy islet cells in a way that would provide protection from any attacks by the body’s immune system, while also being permeable enough to allow the cells to communicate with the body to monitor glucose levels and trigger insulin production. The packages could contain millions of cells – from animal or human sources - and each implant would last months to years, if not a lifetime. Ma, a former postdoctoral researcher at the Koch Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Children’s Hospital Boston who started at Cornell on July 1, received a Junior Faculty Award from American Diabetes Association to support the research.