Dr. Craig L. Duvall is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. He completed his Ph.D. in BME at Georgia Tech and Emory University in 2007 under the guidance of Robert Guldberg, Ph.D. and W. Robert Taylor, M.D., Ph.D. His postdoc was completed in Bioengineering in the labs of Patrick Stayton and Allan Hoffman at the University of Washington through support from an NIH NRSA-funded postdoctoral fellowship. Based on these foundations, the Duvall Advanced Therapeutics Laboratory (ATL) was launched in the Vanderbilt Biomedical Engineering Department in 2010, and Dr. Duvall was promoted to Associate Professor and Professor in 2016 and 2019, respectively. Dr. Duvall has won awards such as the PECASE, NSF CAREER Award, AHA Scientist Development Grant, Society for Biomaterials Young Investigator Award, BMES Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Young Innovator Award, AIMBE Fellow, and standing membership on the Gene and Drug Delivery NIH Study Section. The ATL is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, and National Science Foundation.
The Duvall Advanced Therapeutics Laboratory (ATL) in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University specializes in design and application of smart polymer-based technologies for: (1) intracellular delivery of biological drugs such as peptides and nucleic acids, (2) proximity-activated targeting of drugs to sites of inflammation and matrix remodeling, and (3) long-term, “on-demand” drug release from localized depots. These delivery systems are designed to improve the therapeutic index of existing drugs and/or to serve as enabling technologies for manipulation of intracellular targets currently considered to be “undruggable”. To achieve optimal, finely-tuned therapeutic properties, polymers are utilized that respond to one or more environmental stimuli including pH, matrix metalloproteinases, reactive oxygen species, and temperature.