When Louis DeRidder was 12 years old, he had a medical emergency that nearly cost him his life. The terrifying experience gave him a close-up look at medical care and made him eager to learn more.
“You can’t always pinpoint exactly what gets you interested in something, but that was a transformative moment,” says DeRidder.
In high school, he grabbed the chance to participate in a medicine-focused program, spending about half of his days during his senior year in high school learning about medical science and shadowing doctors.
DeRidder was hooked. He became fascinated by the technologies that make treatments possible and was particularly interested in how drugs are delivered to the brain, a curiosity that sparked a lifelong passion.
“Here I was, a 17-year-old in high school, and a decade later, that problem still fascinates me,” he says. “That’s what eventually got me into the drug delivery field.”
DeRidder’s interests led him to transfer half-way through his undergraduate studies to Johns Hopkins University, where he performed research he had proposed in a Goldwater Scholarship proposal. The research focused on the development of a nanoparticle-drug conjugate to deliver a drug to brain cells in order to transform them from a pro-inflammatory to an anti-inflammatory phenotype. Such a technology could be valuable in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
In 2019, DeRidder entered the joint Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, where he has embarked on a somewhat different type of drug delivery project — developing a device that measures the concentration of a chemotherapy drug in the blood while it is being administered and adjusts the infusion rate so the concentration is optimal for the patient. The system is known as CLAUDIA, or Closed-Loop AUtomated Drug Infusion RegulAtor, and can allow for the personalization of drug dosing for a variety of different drugs.
The project stemmed from discussions with his faculty advisors — Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, and Giovanni Traverso, the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Professor and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. They explained to him that chemotherapy dosing is based on a formula developed in 1916 that estimates a patient’s body surface area. The formula doesn’t consider important influences such as differences in body composition and metabolism, or circadian fluctuations that can affect how a drug interacts with a patient.
“Once my advisors presented the reality of how chemotherapies are dosed,” DeRidder says, “I thought, ‘This is insane. How is this the clinical reality?’”
He and his advisors agreed this was a great project for his PhD.
“After they gave me the problem statement, we began to brainstorm ways that we could develop a medical device to improve the lives of patients” DeRidder says, adding, “I love starting with a blank piece of paper and then brainstorming to work out the best solution.”
Almost from the start, DeRidder’s research process involved MATLAB and Simulink, developed by the mathematical computer software company MathWorks.
“MathWorks and Simulink are key to what we do,” DeRidder says. “They enable us to model the drug pharmacokinetics — how the body distributes and metabolizes the drug. We also model the components of our system with their software. That was especially critical for us in the very early days, because it let us know whether it was even possible to control the concentration of the drug. And since then, we’ve continuously improved the control algorithm, using these simulations. You simulate hundreds of different experiments before performing any experiments in the lab.”
With his innovative use of the MATLAB and Simulink tools, DeRidder was awarded MathWorks fellowships both last year and this year. He has also received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
“The fellowships have been critical to our development of the CLAUDIA drug-delivery system,” DeRidder says, adding that he has “had the pleasure of working with a great team of students and researchers in the lab.”
He says he would like to move CLAUDIA toward clinical use, where he thinks it could have significant impact. “Whatever I can do to help push it toward the clinic, including potentially helping to start a company to help commercialize the system, I’m definitely interested in doing it.”
In addition to developing CLAUDIA, DeRidder is working on developing new nanoparticles to deliver therapeutic nucleic acids. The project involves synthesizing new nucleic acid molecules, as well as developing the new polymeric and lipid nanoparticles to deliver the nucleic acids to targeted tissue and cells.
DeRidder says he likes working on technologies at different scales, from medical devices to molecules — all with the potential to improve the practice of medicine.
Meanwhile, he finds time in his busy schedule to do community service. For the past three years, he has spent time helping the homeless on Boston streets.
“It’s easy to lose track of the concrete, simple ways that we can serve our communities when we’re doing research,” DeRidder says, “which is why I have often sought out ways to serve people I come across every day, whether it is a student I mentor in lab, serving the homeless, or helping out the stranger you meet in the store who is having a bad day.”
Ultimately, DeRidder says, he’ll head back to work that also recalls his early exposure to the medical field in high school, where he interacted with a lot of people with different types of dementia and other neurological diseases at a local nursing home.
“My long-term plan includes working on developing devices and molecular therapies to treat neurological diseases, in addition to continuing to work on cancer,” he says. “Really, I’d say that early experience had a big impact on me.”