image: Nick Vecchiarello is an assistant professor of engineering who earned a $600,000 research award to design materials that can more effectively purify drugs during production.
Credit: Photo by Matt Cosner, UVA Engineering
Protein-based drugs are reshaping how we treat cancer and chronic illness, including diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. But behind each medicine is a complex manufacturing process, one that can be slowed down or derailed by microscopic contaminants. Chemical engineer Nick Vecchiarello at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science wants to change that, and the National Science Foundation has taken notice.
Vecchiarello, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, has earned an NSF CAREER Award to support his research into building new kinds of molecularly engineered surfaces. The $600,000 grant will fund efforts to design materials that can more effectively purify these drugs during production — filtering out everything from stray DNA and proteins to viruses that can slip in during the manufacturing process.
The prestigious five-year grant recognizes early-career faculty who demonstrate the potential to serve as academic role models as they lead research advances in their field.
Our job is to separate what’s valuable from what’s potentially dangerous.
“These medicines are made inside living cells, which don’t just make the drug, they also make a lot of other material you don’t want in the final product,” Vecchiarello said. “Our job is to separate what’s valuable from what’s potentially dangerous.”
To do that, Vecchiarello and his team are developing customized surfaces coated with short chains of amino acids called peptides. These peptides can be tuned to bind or reject specific molecules, depending on what the manufacturing process requires. The coated surfaces are used in chromatography columns — tools that act like microscopic sieves, separating out molecules based on size, shape or chemistry.
What makes this work especially powerful is how the surfaces are developed: Vecchiarello uses high-throughput screening to test many peptides at once, alongside computer modeling to understand why certain combinations work. That data can then guide the design of even better surfaces in a kind of feedback loop.
The expected result? A faster, cleaner, more cost-effective way to purify protein-based drugs that could save manufacturers millions of dollars by reducing waste and failed batches, while helping patients access vital treatments more affordably.
“This isn’t just about improving a single product,” he said. “It’s about transforming the materials and processes that underlie a major part of the pharmaceutical industry.”
The award will also support student training and outreach, including a summer workshop series to help the next generation of engineers gain hands-on experience in bioseparations and materials design.
Vecchiarello’s work complements the computational research of colleague Camille Bilodeau, who also received a CAREER Award earlier this year. Together, the two labs are helping to create an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to drug purification and advanced materials research.
Before joining UVA in 2023, Vecchiarello earned his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and worked as a purification scientist at Amgen, followed by a postdoctoral role at MIT. His lab recently published its first paper, led by Ph.D. student Janani Ram.
“Receiving the CAREER Award is a tremendous honor,” Vecchiarello said. “It allows us to pursue bold research, explore new ideas and ultimately create materials that could have a lasting impact on health care.”