Dr. Giovanni Traverso - 2023 Acta Biomaterialia Silver Medal Recipient

The recipient of the 2023 Acta Biomaterialia Silver Medal is Dr. Giovanni Traverso, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in the Division of Gastroenterology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Harvard Medical School. Dr. Traverso grew up in Peru, Canada and the United Kingdom.  He received his BA from Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK, and his PhD from the laboratory of Prof. Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins University.  He subsequently completed medical school training at the University of Cambridge, his internal medicine residency at BWH and his gastroenterology fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital, both at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Traverso’s early work focused on the development of innovative molecular tests for the early detection of colon cancer and  was published in The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet.  For his post-doctoral research, he worked in the laboratory of Prof. Robert Langer at MIT where he developed a series of technologies for drug delivery as well as physiological sensing via the gastrointestinal (GI) tract.

Dr. Traverso’s current research group is highly multi-disciplinary and engaged in research at the forefront of engineering sciences. Combining materials science, mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering with pharmaceutical and clinical sciences, they are developing the next generation of ingestible drug delivery and sensing devices.  One focus of Dr. Traverso’s research program is drug delivery systems that expand our capacity to efficiently deliver therapeutics through the gastrointestinal tract. His team has developed capsules for long-term residence in the stomach (multiple weeks to months) and capacity for ultra-long drug delivery.  This work is enabling the development of weekly therapy for neuropsychiatric disease, a once-a-month oral contraceptive, and capsules for the eradication of malaria. The group has also designed capsules that achieve self-orientation and injection of biologic drugs into the mucosa, including insulin, monoclonal antibodies and mRNA.  Furthermore, they have developed a family of materials that polymerize in the GI tract for drug delivery and nutrient modulation.   Another area of focus for Dr. Traverso and his team is the development of novel ingestible electronic devices, which can sense a broad array of physiologic and pathophysiologic parameters.  Many of Dr. Traverso’s inventions have been licensed or resulted in start-up companies that he co-founded, and some are now in active human clinical trials, all with the overarching goal of bringing his team’s inventions to help patients at the bedside.

Dr. Traverso’s work has been published in Science, Nature, Science Translational Medicine, Science Robotics, Science Advances, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Materials, Nature Communications, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Cancer Research.  He has been the recipient of the Grand Prize of the Collegiate Inventors Competition, a Research Fellowship from Trinity College (Cambridge, UK), and was named one of the most promising innovators under 35 by the MIT Tech Review’s TR 35. In 2020 he was recognized by Wired Magazine as one of the changemakers of tomorrow who is helping build a better world.  In 2021 he was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation. This past year he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Scholars program, and to the College of Fellows of the Controlled Release Society.

Professor Giovanni Traverso will receive the 2023 Acta Biomaterialia Silver Medal at the Society for Biomaterials meeting to be held in San Diego, CA, April 19-22, 2023.