Welcome to Kelvin Lee's Research Group

Our academic home is the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Our research laboratories are located at the Ammon Pinizzotto Biopharmaceutical Innovation Center on the University of Delaware STAR Campus. Our research infrastructure includes modern technologies and techniques for molecular biology, cell biology, and proteomics. We also regularly use bio-imaging, high-throughput DNA sequencing, and high performance computing cluster resources available through the University of Delaware core facilities to aid in our research. We work closely with our colleagues from Chemical Engineering, Plant and Soil Sciences, Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Materials Science and Engineering. Moreover, we have ongoing collaborations with a number of corporate partners and clinicians as well as academics around the world.

Ammon Pinizzotto Biopharmaceutical Innovation Center
Image Source: https://engr.udel.edu/biopharma/

The research laboratory solves biological problems by working at the molecular scale. The types of problems we work on are dictated in part by student interest but fall into the following general categories: proteomics, genomics, biomolecular & bioprocess engineering, biomedical engineering, and systems biology. More specifically, our current (2020) research projects address the following issues:

1. Establishing industrially relevant platform cell lines and bioprocesses for academic research.
2. Improving productivity and product quality of biopharmaceuticals using the CHO genome.
3. Understanding and mitigating protein expression instability in CHO cells.
4. Enhancing the efficiency of site specific integration (SSI) technology in CHO cells.
5. Identifying stable transcriptional hotpots in the CHO genome using the CHO epigenome.
6. Alleviating production bottlenecks caused by difficult to express (DTE) antibody constructs.
7. Developing technologies to enhance production of adeno-associated viral vectors (AAV)
8. Building in vitro models of the blood-brain barrier to facilitate drug development.

Brain Endothelial Cells: Stained for the tight junction protein,
Green - Occludin, Blue - Nuclei

Our research team is an enthusiastic group of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral scientists and research associates, as well as professional laboratory staff. We meet regularly as a group and disseminate our findings in a number of regular meetings (American Institute of Chemical Engineering, American Chemical Society BIOT Division, American Society for Mass Spectrometry, International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease, Biochemical Engineering, Cell Culture Engineering, and others). We are always looking for bright, motivated new people to join our team.

Front Row (left to right): Anna, Nancy, Kelvin, Maddy, Pei, Ian
Middle Row: Ouyang, Eric, Alana, Erica, Victoria, Diana, Lie, Sumit, Yulin, Scott, Hussain
Back Row: John, Patrick, Manny, Nate, Joanna, Jing, Bill, Doug