Pharmaceutical Sciences Seminar Series
Nanoscale Drug Delivery Systems for Cancer Treatment and Image Guided Surgery
- Adam Alani, PhD
- Oregon State University College of Pharmacy
- Hosted by Professor Glen Kwon
Condition specific nanoscale drug delivery platforms offer versatility in delivering therapeutic payloads for various applications. My talk will focus on how understanding the physiology and disease state enables us to develop nanoscale delivery systems to meet the unmet needs of these disease states. The first portion of my talk will focus on how optimizing nanoscale platforms we can target chemotherapeutics to reach various regions in the tumor microenvironment such as angiogenesis, immune cell populations, hypoxia, and lymphatic micrometastases.
The second part of my talk will focus on how these nano-platforms can be utilized for image-guided surgery. NIR nerve-specific small molecule fluorophores can improve nerve identification and visualization intraoperatively. However, they cannot localize to deep nerve tissue due to their small size and their hydrophobicity. Our nanoscale system incorporating the NIR dye during laparoscopic swine surgery with the daVinci surgical robot (Intuitive Surgical) to simulate hernia repair in a large animal model has identified nerve tissue buried beneath ~3 mm of tissue that was unidentifiable in white light imaging. We have demonstrated all of the systems developed are safe and effective in their respective animal models during preclinical testing and we are pursuing some of the applications for further clinical development. In conclusion, our disease state based approach allows us to tap into the versatility of the nanoscale systems to meet the gaps in the therapeutic outcomes.
This seminar will be held via Webex.
To obtain the Webex link for this seminar, contact Debra King at Debra.King@wisc.edu