At the Interface of Disciplines: Jeffrey Karp pulls from nature and nano to transform medicine

Five years ago, Jeffrey Karp sat down to a dinner party with Massachusetts General Hospital dermatologist R. Rox Anderson. The two started talking, and by the end of the evening, Karp-himself a bioengineer at the nearby Brigham and Women´s Hospital-knew he wanted to make a collaboration happen between them. But on what? As he thought, he twisted his ring-his nickel allergy had flared up, and the skin on his finger was chafed and raw. Twist, and think; twist, think. And then it hit him: up to 45 million people in the United States shared his allergy, and the best measures they had to control it were small-molecule chelating creams with a dangerous tendency to leach into the skin.