CapstoneEngineerMagazineFall2026 - Flipbook - Page 8
| FEATURE |
Engineering
the Future of Healthcare
by Natalie Bonner
rom the molecules hidden in everyday foods to intelligent robotic devices and improved diagnostic tools, faculty
in the Styslinger College of Engineering are tackling some of the healthcare industry’s most pressing problems.
Though their work spans the spectrum of patient care, from drug development and personalized mobility devices
to improving the accuracy of one of medicine’s most frequently used devices, Drs. Yuping Bao, Qiang “Jason” Zhang and
Amanda Koh share a common goal: to use engineering innovation to improve patient outcomes and make healthcare
safer, more effective and more accessible.
F
DR. YUPING BAO
It’s often said that good things come in small packages,
and for one engineering professor, that maxim rings true.
The next breakthrough in breast cancer treatment might
come from something as unassuming as the parsley in
your pasta or your nightly cup of green tea.
Dr. Yuping Bao, associate professor and
associate department head for graduate programs in
the department of chemical and biological engineering,
is conducting multiple research projects that are improving
the prognoses of patients with breast cancer.
DRUG RESISTANCE IN ER-POSITIVE BREAST CANCER
A class of drugs called CDK 4/6 inhibitors has recently
been implemented for use in treating metastatic
estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer. While these
drugs can be highly effective in blocking the proteins that
enable cancerous tumors to grow, many patients are prone
to develop resistance to these therapies and often end up
being treated with harmful chemotherapies instead.
The goal of Bao’s research group is to prevent the
development of CDK 4/6 inhibitor resistance and thus the
use of these toxic chemotherapies, helping patients achieve
better health outcomes and fewer side effects.
“A lot of times we are not trying to treat the disease,
but rather we are trying to make the current treatment
more effective,” Bao said. “For example, with ER-positive
breast cancer, we already have treatments and standards
of care, but the problem is that when people go through
these therapies, they develop drug resistance, meaning
that the original concentration of the drug is no
longer effective. Then, you have to either increase the
concentration of the current drug, look for a new drug or
combine multiple drugs, which causes many side effects.”
Bao’s research focuses on a protein called
glycoprotein non-metastatic melanoma protein B, which
research collaborators con昀椀rmed to be signi昀椀cant in the
development of CDK 4/6 inhibitor resistance using data
from patients enrolled in a clinical trial. Having veri昀椀ed
this glycoprotein’s importance in developing resistance,
the team is now working with drug screening technology
to identify compounds that bind to glycoprotein NMB.
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8 | CAPSTONE ENGINEER | FALL 2025
Using molecular modeling, the research group will
design novel compounds that can inhibit the protein as a
means to reverse resistance.
NATURAL SUPPLEMENTS TARGETING DRUG RESISTANCE
Bao is also working on a project targeting natural
compounds found in foods like onions, herbs and green
tea, further developing compound formulations and
delivery strategies to reverse drug resistance.
One promising approach involves extracellular
vesicles, which are tiny, nanoscale particles
that cells release to communicate with each other.
Although they show potential for applications in
drug delivery and disease treatment, they vary
widely in size and makeup, introducing challenges
in consistent production and dosing. Bao’s team and
collaborators aim to address these problems by
developing innovative production methods to generate
EVs in a scalable and reproducible manner.
“Being in this pharmaceutical 昀椀eld, we’ve known for
a long time that it doesn’t matter what type of drug you
develop, as time goes by, [patients] always develop drug
resistance and experience side effects,” Bao said. “What
we’re trying to do is use food supplements or herbal
supplements to target the particular disease receptor and
reverse drug resistance, making the original therapy safe
and useful again.”
Bao and the other researchers on her team use
technologies to extract these EVs from the plants that
they naturally occur in.
“We use a drug screening platform that works like
昀椀shing bait,” Bao said. “We can 昀椀sh things out from a plant
extract, like a cup of tea, that bind to a particular cellular
target or in昀氀uence a speci昀椀c cellular function.”
Because EVs are biocompatible and can cross
biological barriers, they make for very ef昀椀cient drug
carriers and therefore have the ability to be engineered to
deliver natural molecules effectively.
“Extracellular vesicles are like a delivery vehicle,”
Bao said. “We’re working to 昀椀gure out how we can deliver
drugs to the targeted place we want them to be without
causing side effects.”
