About

Yevgeny Brudno is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at NC State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research focuses on areas including medicinal chemistry, green chemistry, and drug discovery. He is involved in various research centers and facilities, contributing to the advancement of chemical and biomedical sciences. His work integrates interdisciplinary approaches to address complex problems in chemistry and pharmacology, supporting the department's mission of innovative research and education.

Research topics

• Biotechnology
• Chemistry
• Materials science
• Nanotechnology
• Cell biology
• Biology
• Polymer chemistry
• Biomedical engineering

Selected publications

• 4-Anilinoquinazoline carbamate derivatization as a platform for prodrug design and localized drug delivery

  Bioorganic Chemistry · 2026-04-23

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Implantable CAR T cell factories enhance solid tumor treatment

  UNC Libraries · 2026-04-16

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• A biomaterial platform for T cell-specific gene delivery

  UNC Libraries · 2026-04-21

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Data Management and Sharing Plan for: DMS/NIGMS 1: Computational Methods for Understanding the Mechanisms of Transduction for Cellular Reprogramming

  UNC Dataverse · 2026-04-06

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Data Management and Sharing Plan describes the scientific data to be generated and/or used in the research and outlines a strategy for managing and sharing project data.

  PublisherDOI

• Soaking Up Success: Sponge-Assisted Nanoparticle Transfection

  Research Square · 2026-01-30

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Hydrodynamic dispersion drives viral-cellular contact for gene delivery in porous media

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2026-01-16

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Reactive biological processes often hinge on rare collisions between particles that occupy vastly different physical regimes, yet the transport physics that govern these encounters remain poorly understood. Biological cell-virus encounters offer a uniquely quantifiable instance of this general problem: collisions between particles whose transport is governed by entirely different physical mechanisms, yet whose interactions determine system-level function. In stagnant liquids, nanoscale viral vectors explore space only through slow Brownian diffusion, while microscale cells rapidly sediment, producing species separation that suppresses the virus-cell interaction interface. Here we show that liquid absorption into a dry, macroporous sponge enhances viral-cellular interactions by shifting the system into an advection-dispersion regime that circumvents this sedimentation-diffusion limit. By integrating experimental results with a multiscale simulation model, we demonstrate that the tortuous sponge porosity converts capillary-driven flow into convective mixing, driving orders-of-magnitude increases in viral-cellular collision rates. Coupling these dispersive transport dynamics with a probabilistic capture model reveals that hydrodynamic dispersion accounts for the multifold enhancement in viral-cellular transduction efficiency observed in porous sponges. These results provide a quantitative framework for emergent collision dynamics in complex porous media and establish a generalizable strategy to optimize active transport in spatiotemporally heterogeneous biological systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Versatile and Efficient Method to Quantify Purity and Degree of Substitution in Alginate Derivatives

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "From saccharides to synthetics: exploring biomaterial scaffolds as cell transduction enhancers"

  2025-03-25

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Optimizing canine T cell activation, expansion, and transduction

  PLoS ONE · 2025-09-11 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Dogs are becoming an important model for human cancers, and successfully troubleshooting issues with genetically modified T cell immunotherapy for round cell and solid neoplasms in dogs provides a unique opportunity to improve efficacy, safety, and affordability for humans as well. Unfortunately, T cell activation in dogs for optimal viral transduction has not been determined, restricting advancements in canine T cell immunotherapy. Two αCD3 and two αCD28 antibody clones for canine T cell stimulation have been described in the literature, but no studies have been undertaken to evaluate which αCD3/αCD28 combination is most effective, nor has anyone directly compared the efficacy of the two most popular antibody presentation strategies: antibody-coated plates and antibody-conjugated beads. In evaluating the effects of plate- or bead-bound αCD3 stimulation alone versus αCD3/αCD28 in combination, we tested 12 possible antibody stimulation strategies in addition to evaluating two largely unexplored mitogens in canine T cell transduction, phorbol myristate acetate (PMA) with ionomycin and concanavalin A (ConA). We investigated the impact of these stimulation strategies on canine T cell activation, expansion, and transduction. For stimulation strategies producing the best results, we also examined how each strategy affected the proportions of CD4/CD8 T cell subsets and regulatory T cell (Treg) prevalence. We determined that, in general, plate-bound antibodies were far superior to bead-bound antibodies for canine T cell stimulation, and that plate-bound αCD3 clone CA17.6F9 in combination with αCD28 clone 5B8 or the mitogen PMA with ionomycin produced better activation and expansion profiles, better transduction, and more desirable T cell subsets that are more likely to improve patient outcomes in dogs suffering from round cell and solid tumors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Author Correction: Bioinstructive implantable scaffolds for rapid in vivo manufacture and release of CAR-T cells

  Nature Biotechnology · 2025-02-03

  erratumOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Image-guided, ultrasound-enhanced long-term intracranial drug delivery

  NIH · $369k · 2020–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Sharda Pandit

  North Carolina State University

  26 shared

• Pritha Agarwalla

  North Carolina State University

  25 shared

• David Mooney

  25 shared

• Frances S. Ligler

  Texas A&M University

  16 shared

• Christopher T. Moody

  North Carolina State University

  14 shared

• Michael E. Birnbaum

  Allen Institute

  13 shared

• Gianpietro Dotti

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  12 shared

• Qian Li

  Kunming University of Science and Technology

  12 shared

Labs

• Yevgeny Brudno LabPI