Judit Puskas elected to National Academy of Inventors

Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering Professor Judit Puskas has been awarded the title of Fellow by the National Academy of Inventors. She joins a class of 175 academic innovators representing universities and governmental or nonprofit research institutes named to the Fellows program this year.

Ohio State Food Science and Technology Professor Monica Giusti also received the prestigious honor. They are the 11th and 12th Ohio State inventors to be chosen as NAI Fellows.

Puskas is a relative newcomer to Ohio State, joining the faculty in 2019, but has had a long industry and academic career in rubber technology, developing polymers with multiple applications.

She is perhaps known best as a co-inventor, while she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Akron, of the polymer used to coat the Taxus coronary stent licensed by Boston Scientific, which has been implanted in more than 10 million patients. The material had a particularly useful property: recyclability.

“We were working on a particular rubber, and the beauty of it is that it’s recyclable, so you can melt it down and make another shape out of it,” Puskas said. “We didn’t know that it would end up as a polymer coating on a coronary stent.”

Since then, she has continued to refine the polymer technology, bolstering its impermeability and taking advantage of its ability to be used inside the body without generating a damaging immune response. Most recently, she filed a patent disclosure of her invention of a COVID-19 mask.

For two decades, Puskas has been working on development of a polymer coating for a breast cancer reconstruction implant that contains drugs.

“The implant becomes storage for the drug, and the coating allows the drug to slowly release into the body. It could be used in place of intravenous chemotherapy,” she said. “The beauty of this is we are very close.”

In 2012, Puskas was one of five winners of the GE Healthymagination Breast Cancer Challenge Award, selected from 500 international applications. She also was the first woman to receive the Charles Goodyear Gold Medal from the American Chemical Society. A Breast Cancer Innovation Foundation was established in Akron to support her breast implant research.

An Ohio State faculty member since 2004, Giusti focuses on harnessing the beneficial properties of naturally occurring compounds in colorful fruits and vegetables for their potential use in a variety of other food products. These phytochemicals, and particularly anthocyanins, which are pigments that provide red to blue colors to a wide variety of plants, are known to be antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents.

Engineering Professors Hesham El Gamal and Liang-Shih Fan also are NAI Fellows.

The NAI Fellows Program was established to highlight academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society. Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors.

Giusti, Puskas and the rest of the 2020 class of Fellows will be inducted on June 8, 2021, during the NAI’s Tenth Annual Meeting scheduled to be held in Tampa, Florida.

adapted version of Ohio State News article