Dr. Laurencin previously served as Dean for the UConn School of Medicine and as Vice President for Health Affairs for the whole university. He received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama in 2016.

Dr. Laurencin, a native of Philadelphia, was initially trained as an engineer, receiving his B,S. from Princeton. He went on to Harvard for medical school, and received a Ph.D. in Biochemical Engineering from MIT. He trained as an orthopedic surgeon at Harvard and Cornell, and has held both medical and academic posts at Drexel University and the University of Virginia. He moved to the University of Connecticut in 2008. In addition to the administrative roles, he is also a professor at the medical school and of Chemical, Materials, and Biomolecular Engineering.

The amount of pressure within an organ is important to measure accurately in order to assess health — for instance, the amount of pressure put on the walls of arteries (blood pressure) affects risk of stroke and heart attack. Tools to measure these pressures would be more accurate if they were inside the organ, rather than something external like a blood pressure cuff. However, there are a lot of limitations on what can safely be put into the body: it needs to be soft and flexible so that it doesn’t interfere with normal functioning, it cannot trigger the immune system, and ideally it would be biodegradable (so you would only need a surgery to put it in, but not a second one to take it out).

In a recent paper, Dr. Laurencin and colleagues describe an implant they made to measure the pressure exerted by the diaphragm during breathing. This implant was made entirely from materials that have been approved as safe by the FDA, was sensitive to a wide range of pressure values, and didn’t degrade too quickly to be useful. The majority of the paper is focused on how they built the device and how they confirmed that it worked at all, but the authors did also attempt inserting their device into a mouse’s abdomen. They were able to measure a regular, repeating pressure pattern as the mouse breathed, which slowed and then stopped as they euthanized it. This proof of concept experiment is an exciting step toward building new implantable devices for measuring relevant physiological processes.