Complementing Cois Coiribe‘s article on Finding Ways to Live Well as We Age from Prof Abhay Pandit, Founding Director of CÚRAM, this spotlight feature on Dr Catalina Vallejo Giraldo explores her unique research and motivations. Read on to find out more about both her academic insight as well as her vision for the years to come.
Dr Catalina Vallejo Giraldo is part of the School of Engineering, College of Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and CÚRAM Research Ireland Centre for Medical Devices.
I am originally from Medellin, Colombia, where I studied Biomedical Engineering at Universidad EIA and Universidad CES. I completed research Internships at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), Trieste, Italy and the Université Paris Est Créteil, France and a Master of Science in Biomedical Sciences at the Mayo Graduate School, Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, USA, focusing on sustained release of neurosteroids for spinal cord injury repair. I completed my PhD with Dr Manus Biggs at CÚRAM Research Ireland Centre for Medical Devices, based at University of Galway, in 2018. This focused on the modification of implantable electrode systems to improve their performance when used, for example, in neural recording and in deep brain stimulation in patients with neurological disease such as dystonia and Parkinson’s disease. As a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London, I worked on the development of neuronal living electrodes for almost three years. To date, my own research is at the intersection of biomaterials, brain mechanobiology, and medicine to develop well-informed functional biomaterial and cell disease platforms for rapidly developing new brain-targeted therapies.
My current research is based on my previous work on the advancement of biomaterials for neural-electrode interfaces. Thanks to my earlier findings, my laboratory focuses on expanding the understanding of the fundamentals of cell–cell interactions in 3D cellular configurations to simulate specific brain diseases by applying physical and mechanical cues. This allows us to understand the critical changes in cell morphology, molecular markers, and sugar profiles to inform the development of novel biomaterial platforms to target these diseases.
One current project in my laboratory, led by PhD student Akash Garhwal, involves developing and characterising a specific 3D cellular system called “assembloids”. These are mini-brains in a dish to recreate models for traumatic brain injury in this case. They enable real-time evaluation of local cell forces, their relationship to cell shape changes, and visualisation of protein expression to inspire the development of new material to protect and recover cell function.
The recently awarded European Research Council Starting Grant (ERCStG) will allow us to work on “TrapKill” – a functionalised biomaterial platform for trapping and killing cancer cells to render them susceptible to nuclei-DNA damage. The development of this biomaterial device for the efficacy of current pharmacological and radiation therapies used to treat brain cancers is potentially of enormous value for treatment of a range of other neuro-oncology disorders, many of which are degenerative in nature and associated with an unpredictable degradation in an individual’s response to chemo- and radiotherapy treatments. Of importance is that the proposed technology represents a change from conventional cancer treatments, using combinatorial approaches from biomaterial and cancer research to enhance the uptake of gold standard therapies.
[In 2024] Dr Catalina Vallejo Giraldo has just been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting grant worth €1.5 million to further her research on cancers of the brain, a major global health problem with limited treatment options. ERC starting grants are awarded to talented early-career scientists who are embarking on independent work and show clear potential to be a research leader. Read more in the press release here.
