Incorporating COVID-19 into immunoengineering curriculum

5/13/2020 Huan Song

Students who signed up for BIOE 498 Immunoengineering during the Spring 2020 semester could not have anticipated how the COVID-19 pandemic would impact their learning. In this course, taught by Assistant Professor Shannon Sirk, students explore engineering approaches as applied to the immune system and its manipulation for therapeutic interventions. 

Written by Huan Song

Students who signed up for BIOE 498 Immunoengineering during the Spring 2020 semester could not have anticipated how the COVID-19 pandemic would impact their learning. In this course, taught by Assistant Professor Shannon Sirk, students explore engineering approaches as applied to the immune system and its manipulation for therapeutic interventions.

This class is structured around weekly instructor-led lectures and student-led literature discussions with a focus on critical analysis of scientific findings in primary literature.

Monika Kizerwetter is a Bioengineering senior in the cell and tissue engineering track who will be starting a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University this fall in Biomedical Engineering with a focus in immunoengineering. "I wanted to take a formal immunology class at the U of I and knew Dr.Sirk from the stem cell engineering class. I was excited to take this class with her," she said.

Tarun Nagarajan, a Bioengineering senior in the therapeutics engineering track said, "Dr. Sirk pushed literature review and the importance of reading and analyzing papers. Whether we are going into industry or academia after graduation, this ability to think and read critically is extremely valuable." 

Abby Cabush, one of the few Bioengineering sophomores in this class said, "this class is very student-led and exploration-based and that's what I really liked about it." Her key takeaway from this class is to be able to clearly articulate the purpose of an experiment, the methods and how the findings impact the wider scientific community. 

As the pandemic unfolded in March, COVID-19 news and developments started to be incorporated in class discussions. 

The semester culminates in a final group project where teams select and examine a current immunoengineering technique. Before spring break, Sirk also gave her students the opportunity to change their final project topic to focus on COVID-19. Several teams in her class made this pivot. 

"We were able to change our project to something that is relevant to what's going on now in the real world," said Jairaj Narendran, a Bioengineering junior in the therapeutics engineering track

COVID-19, like other viruses, cannot reproduce on their own and must hijack host cells to multiply. Specifically, this SARS-CoV-2 virus enters a human host cell by targeting angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptors. While ACE2 is found throughout the body, it is abundantly present in the epithelial cells of the lungs. Narendran's group is looking at using engineered bacteria with the same ACE2 receptors as a decoy for this virus to bind to instead of to human cells. 

"Once the virus enters the bacteria, we can engineer machinery to degrade the viral RNA and keep it from multiplying," Narendran said. Using bacteria to target malignant cells has been tested in cancer cells but there are few studies around its use for viruses. 

"There are a lot of factors to consider. Every week, we would have a peer discussion or a meeting with our professor so we can keep on revising our proposal," he said. 

Cabush's group also shifted to a COVID-19 related project focused on treatment. "In serious cases of COVID-19, there is a severe inflammatory response which can cause cells to die as a result of the body's immune response," she said. "We are trying to protect the body against this inflammatory response by looking at two antimalarial drugs." 

"Immunoengineering can be very useful because the immune system is involved in almost every disease," said Kizerwetter. "If you think about it, vaccines are a form of immunotherapy. Even though the field of immunoengineering is relatively new, we have been using immunotherapies for a long time." 


Share this story

This story was published May 13, 2020.