Health Engineering at Chemical Engineering

Healthcare solutions are becoming increasingly more integrated across disciplines and scales, for instance combining soft materials with tissues, and integrating knowledge of transport phenomena into advanced numerical models of disease progression. Chemical engineering approaches can play a crucial role in many healthcare developments, where innovations could impact millions of lives. Expanding on expertise in the Department, we envision integrating approaches and methods from ChemE disciplines at different length scales to create a research hub on personalized/precision drug delivery and monitoring of therapeutic effects, both in vitro (organ on chip) and in silico (modelling ranging from molecular scale to patient-specific data). We plan to expand the ongoing activity on materials for controlled release applications with minimally invasive triggers, by strengthening the existing activities with complementary multiscale theoretical/modelling activities.

Examples are multiscale modelling of the transport and interactions of molecules with membranes, cells, organs-on-chip; or multiscale modelling of formulations for drug delivery including response to triggers for controlled release. The second area where we see a clear opportunity for chemical engineering is in evaluation platforms (organ-on-chip models capable of mimicking real human tissues) with