April 19, 2021
Marcelle Machluf to present Anatomy and Physiology Seminar
Marcelle Machluf, professor and dean of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, will present "MSC-Nano-Ghosts: A cancer delivery platform or an inflammatory therapeutic" at the next Anatomy and Physiology Seminar at 4 p.m. Tuesday, April 20, via Zoom.
Machluf's laboratory works in the drug delivery area, focusing on a novel delivery system that is based on the cell membrane of stem cells and is termed Nanoghosts. Another area of research is tissue engineering: developing scaffolds that are focused on natural isolated extracellular matrix and that are modulated to allow injectable, microcapsule or other 3D platforms formation.
Machluf holds a doctorate from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering the unit of Biotechnology, Ben Gurion University Bear Sheva, in liposomes and polymer delivery for development of vaccines. She had a postdoctoral fellowship of five years' experience in drug delivery, gene therapy and tissue engineering at Harvard Medical School, Boston. She also has an adjunct professor position in the prestigious School of Materials Science Engineering, NTU, Singapore.
Her group, which consists of 15 doctoral students, three postdoc and two research assistances. Machluf has published more than 90 papers — among which Nature Biotec, Nano Letters, Cancer Research, J of Controlled Release — and chapters in books. She has eight patents in the national phase and four internationally approved ones in the field of drug delivery and tissue engineering. Machluf is on the editorial board of several journals among which are Scientific Report and Tissue Engineering and part of the Minerva Programe Committee, under the Max-Planck Institute, Germany.
Her work in drug delivery was selected by the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology as one of Israel’s 60 most impactful scientists for developments in the field of advanced cancer therapies. She was also chosen to light the torch for the 70th independent year of the state of Israel. Lady Globes Magazine selected her as the 2018 Women of the Year. In November 2019, Machluf founded a startup company, NanoGhost, for the therapy of cancer and raised $5 million to support the scale-up process of the platform until reaching Phase 1 clinical studies.