Current affiliations

• Position

  Senior Postdoctoral Fellow

  Company

  Nanomedicine Laboratory, Institute of Molecular Medicine, Univeristy of Texas Health Science Centre at Houston

  Further information

City:

None chosen

Hub:

None chosen

Despite extraordinary progress in the laboratory, cancer mortality has not been reduced by any significant amount in the last fifty years. The main reasons are that ‘cancer’ is actually several hundreds of disease, which differ dramatically in terms of their biology, and respond very differently to drugs. I believe that nanotechnology offers unprecedented opportunities to develop minimally invasive, economically feasible approaches to early detection and treatment of cancer with the ultimate goal of achieving the personalization of intervention. My interests are in the field of drug delivery for cancer treatment and in the field of early diagnosis of tumor burden through protein profiling in the blood.

Project 1
Detection of low abundant proteins and peptides in the serum.

The ability to obtain early information from proteins and other molecules in blood or other biological fluids would represent an epochal advance. However, this approach is extraordinarily difficult, since many proteins need to be analyzed at the same time, the molecular population present in the blood is extremely diverse, and the proteins of interest are billion-fold less abundant that the most concentrated proteins.
To solve this problem, we have invented and are developing nanotechnology-based proteomic nanochips that can sort out and concentrate proteins of interest from blood samples. The chips are interrogated with Mass Spectrometry, with no need for additional sample preparation, leading to the potential for very high-throughput.

Project 2
Multistage delivery system for cancer imaging and therapy

The problem of identifying different molecular targets, avoiding all biological barriers, delivering multiple cancer cell killing modes, and personalizing therapy has been addressed by trying to endow drug molecules with all of these capabilities. This strategy has met with limited success. Our novel approach is the decoupling of the above functions through the use of ‘carrier’ particles that possess sufficient multi-functionality to avoid biological barriers and recognize their targets.