When Louis DeRidder was 12 years outdated, he had a medical emergency that almost value him his life. The terrifying expertise gave him a close-up have a look at medical care and made him desperate to be taught extra.
“You may’t all the time pinpoint precisely what will get you curious about one thing, however that was a transformative second,” says DeRidder.
In highschool, he grabbed the possibility to take part in a medicine-focused program, spending about half of his days throughout his senior yr in highschool studying about medical science and shadowing medical doctors.
DeRidder was hooked. He grew to become fascinated by the applied sciences that make remedies potential and was significantly concerned about how medicine are delivered to the mind, a curiosity that sparked a lifelong ardour.
“Right here I used to be, a 17-year-old in highschool, and a decade later, that drawback nonetheless fascinates me,” he says. “That’s what finally received me into the drug supply subject.”
DeRidder’s pursuits led him to switch half-way by way of his undergraduate research to Johns Hopkins College, the place he carried out analysis he had proposed in a Goldwater Scholarship proposal. The analysis centered on the event of a nanoparticle-drug conjugate to ship a drug to mind cells with a view to remodel them from a pro-inflammatory to an anti-inflammatory phenotype. Such a expertise may very well be priceless within the remedy of neurodegenerative ailments, together with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
In 2019, DeRidder entered the joint Harvard-MIT Well being Sciences and Expertise program, the place he has launched into a considerably totally different sort of drug supply mission — growing a tool that measures the focus of a chemotherapy drug within the blood whereas it’s being administered and adjusts the infusion charge so the focus is perfect for the affected person. The system is named CLAUDIA, or Closed-Loop AUtomated Drug Infusion RegulAtor, and may enable for the personalization of drug dosing for a wide range of totally different medicine.
The mission stemmed from discussions along with his school advisors — Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, and Giovanni Traverso, the Karl Van Tassel Profession Growth Professor and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Ladies’s Hospital. They defined to him that chemotherapy dosing is predicated on a formulation developed in 1916 that estimates a affected person’s physique floor space. The formulation doesn’t take into account essential influences akin to variations in physique composition and metabolism, or circadian fluctuations that may have an effect on how a drug interacts with a affected person.
“As soon as my advisors introduced the truth of how chemotherapies are dosed,” DeRidder says, “I believed, ‘That is insane. How is that this the medical actuality?’”
He and his advisors agreed this was an excellent mission for his PhD.
“After they gave me the issue assertion, we started to brainstorm ways in which we may develop a medical system to enhance the lives of sufferers” DeRidder says, including, “I like beginning with a clean piece of paper after which brainstorming to work out the most effective resolution.”
Nearly from the beginning, DeRidder’s analysis course of concerned MATLAB and Simulink, developed by the mathematical pc software program firm MathWorks.
“MathWorks and Simulink are key to what we do,” DeRidder says. “They allow us to mannequin the drug pharmacokinetics — how the physique distributes and metabolizes the drug. We additionally mannequin the elements of our system with their software program. That was particularly vital for us within the very early days, as a result of it tell us whether or not it was even potential to manage the focus of the drug. And since then, we’ve repeatedly improved the management algorithm, utilizing these simulations. You simulate a whole bunch of various experiments earlier than performing any experiments within the lab.”
Along with his modern use of the MATLAB and Simulink instruments, DeRidder was awarded MathWorks fellowships each final yr and this yr. He has additionally obtained a Nationwide Science Basis Graduate Analysis Fellowship.
“The fellowships have been vital to our improvement of the CLAUDIA drug-delivery system,” DeRidder says, including that he has “had the pleasure of working with an excellent group of scholars and researchers within the lab.”
He says he wish to transfer CLAUDIA towards medical use, the place he thinks it may have vital influence. “No matter I can do to assist push it towards the clinic, together with probably serving to to start out an organization to assist commercialize the system, I’m positively concerned about doing it.”
Along with growing CLAUDIA, DeRidder is engaged on growing new nanoparticles to ship therapeutic nucleic acids. The mission entails synthesizing new nucleic acid molecules, in addition to growing the brand new polymeric and lipid nanoparticles to ship the nucleic acids to focused tissue and cells.
DeRidder says he likes engaged on applied sciences at totally different scales, from medical units to molecules — all with the potential to enhance the apply of medication.
In the meantime, he finds time in his busy schedule to do group service. For the previous three years, he has hung out serving to the homeless on Boston streets.
“It’s straightforward to lose monitor of the concrete, easy ways in which we are able to serve our communities once we’re doing analysis,” DeRidder says, “which is why I’ve typically sought out methods to serve individuals I come throughout each day, whether or not it’s a pupil I mentor in lab, serving the homeless, or serving to out the stranger you meet within the retailer who’s having a foul day.”
Finally, DeRidder says, he’ll head again to work that additionally remembers his early publicity to the medical subject in highschool, the place he interacted with lots of people with various kinds of dementia and different neurological ailments at a neighborhood nursing residence.
“My long-term plan consists of engaged on growing units and molecular therapies to deal with neurological ailments, along with persevering with to work on most cancers,” he says. “Actually, I’d say that early expertise had a big effect on me.”
