Jeffrey Hubbell, the Barry L. MacLean Professor of Molecular Engineering Innovation and Enterprise at the University of Chicago, recently received the Society for Biomaterials’ 2017 Founders Award, the organization’s top honor, given for “long-term, landmark contributions to the discipline of biomaterials.”
“It is a great honor to be recognized as having developed, with my team, ideas that are foundational to our field,” Hubbell said.
Hubbell designs materials to assemble and function in such a way that they can stimulate the immune system to fight infection or malignancy—or turn off some aspects of the immune system to address auto-immune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes. He is credited with the term “immuno-modulatory materials” to describe this newly emerging field of research. Hubbell and his team develop molecular- and materials-engineering approaches in immunotherapy. It focuses on vaccination in infectious disease and cancer, as well as on an antigen-specific tolerance induction to protein drugs and autoimmune antigens.
