Chih-Chang Chu, Ph.D.

C.C. Chu, the Rebecca Q. Morgan ’60 Professor of Fiber Science & Apparel Design, has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). He is one of 148 academic inventors to receive the honor this year.

Chu’s work focuses on biodegradable biomaterials design and development applications, including tissue engineering for human body repair. He has more than 90 U.S. and international patents.

His multidisciplinary work, which spans biomaterial engineering and medical sciences, has applications for the treatment of burns, diseased heart valves and blood vessels, bone repair, gene transfection for gene therapy, drug delivery nanotechnology for cancer therapy, and immunotherapy for cancer patients… Continue reading.

Dr. Chih-Chang “C.C.” Chu, the Rebecca Q. Morgan ’60 Professor of Fiber Science at Cornell University, has developed many technologies with new biomaterials. His research includes the design and synthesis of biodegradable polymeric biomaterials for wound healing/closure, tissue regeneration, vascular grafts, heart valves, artificial skins, bone regeneration, infection control, drug control/release, DNA carriers for gene therapy, identification and forensic purposes.

Specifically, Dr. Chu and his laboratory developed an entirely new family of enzymatically biodegradable amino acid-based polymers called poly(ester amide)s (PEA) or “pseudo-proteins” exhibiting both protein and non-protein properties. PEAs elicit much lower inflammatory responses than many FDA-approved commercial biomaterials. When coupled with PEAs, commercial biomaterials also reduce their inflammation elicitation. Such ability to attenuate inflammation offers major advantages in promoting natural wound healing, reducing implant-derived complications, or improving success rates of surgical implants. As such, PEAs are ideal coatings for medical devices for either drug-elution or for improving other performance characteristics in vivo. PEAs also support proliferation of diverse cell types and therefore are useful for either tissue engineering or production of biologics.