Symposium F.SM07—Biomaterials for Studying and Controlling the Immune System
The immune system is an enormously complex network of cells and molecules that work together to defend the body against infectious disease, cancer and other invaders, all while leaving healthy cells and tissues unaffected.Immunology, therefore, is central to many biomedical applications. As our understanding of the immune system continues to grow, immunoengineering will become an increasingly important approach to understand, manipulate, and eventually control the immune system to address biomedical challenges ranging from infectious disease to cancer to auto-immune diseases to biomaterials for regenerative medicine. This symposium will cover a broad array of topics from fundamental interactions of the immune system with implanted or administered biomaterials to controlled delivery of immunomodulatory compounds to engineered biomaterials for directing/exploring cell behavior ex-vivo. Symposium attendees will benefit from speakers sharing their broad expertise in materials science, bioengineering, and immunology and will be exposed to the many groundbreaking new developments and discoveries in this fast-growing interdisciplinary field.