Brian Kwee, Ph.D.

BRIAN KWEE
Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor
Ammon Pinizzotto Biopharmaceutical Innovation Center
590 Avenue 1743, Ste 403
Newark, DE 19713
E: bkwee@udel.edu

Lab Website

EDUCATION

• Postdoctoral Fellow, 2018-2022, U.S. Food and Drug Administration
• Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences: Bioengineering, 2018, Harvard University
• B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, 2012, Cornell University

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

• Cell & Tissue Engineering

• Drug Delivery & Nanomedicine

RESEARCH AREAS

• Tissue Engineering
• Drug Delivery
• Immunoengineering
• Cell Manufacturing
• Vascular and Skeletal Muscle Tissue Regeneration

AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST

The Kwee Laboratory develops innovative approaches to enhance the efficacy of skeletal muscle tissue engineering therapies. These therapies include methods for combining muscle cells, supporting cells (i.e. endothelial cells that form blood vessels), and/or cytokines with biomaterials to treat muscle injuries and diseases. We are specifically interested in applying concepts of immunoengineering and cell manufacturing to enhance these therapies:

IMMUNOENGINEERING

It is becoming increasingly appreciated that the immune system plays a critical role in tissue regeneration. However, impaired or prolonged inflammation can lead to adverse tissue responses, such as fibrosis and necrosis. We design cell and drug delivery biomaterials that can recruit host immune cells and modulate them to promote muscle regeneration. Our designed biomaterials control the number and type of innate and adaptive immune cells (i.e. macrophages and T-cells) at sites of injury and disease to induce pro-regenerative inflammatory microenvironments.

CELL MANUFACTURING

The clinical success of cell therapies is limited by cellular functional heterogeneity, where cells from different donors or subpopulations within a donor exhibit varying potency. Our work focuses on reducing this heterogeneity with fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) to identify cell subpopulations of varying therapeutic potency in biomaterials.  We focus on sorting these cells by integrin/cadherin expression and evaluating how these cell subpopulations function and/or form tissues in biomaterial scaffolds. We are applying this cell manufacturing approach to endothelial cells and muscle cells combined with biomaterials to engineer vascularized muscle tissues.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

For a complete list of publications, check Dr. Kwee’s Google Scholar.

Kwee BJ, Lam J, Akue A, KuKuruga M, Zhang K, Gu L, Sung KE. Functional heterogeneity of IFN-γ-licensed mesenchymal stromal cell immunosuppressive capacity on biomaterials. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2021, 118 (35) e2105972118

Kwee BJ, Sung KE. Engineering microenvironments for cell therapy product manufacturing. Experimental Biology and Medicine. 2021, 246: 1845–1856

Kwee BJ, Seo BR, Najibi AJ, Li WA, Shih TY, White D, Mooney DJ. Treating ischemia via recruitment of antigen-specific T cells. Science Advances. 2019, 5(7):eaav6313

Kwee BJ, Budina E, Najibi AJ, Mooney DJ. CD4 T-cells Regulate Angiogenesis and Myogenesis. Biomaterials. 2018, 178:109-121

Kwee BJ, Mooney DJ. Biomaterials for Skeletal Muscle Tissue Engineering. Current Opinion in Biotechnology. 2017, 47:16-22

Kwee BJ, Mooney DJ. Manipulating the intersection of angiogenesis and inflammation. Annals of biomedical engineering. 2015, 43:628-640