Presenter: Prof. Honggang Cui (The Johns Hopkins University)
Topic: One-Component Nanomedicine
Time: 9:45 AM, Jul. 12th (Tuesday)
Location: Conference Room B, BLDG909-1F
Abstract
The creation of vehicles for the effective delivery of hydrophobicanticancer drugs to tumor sites has garnered major attention in cancerchemotherapies for several decades. Current approaches focus on the use ofnanosized carriers, whereby the drug’s pharmacokinetic properties andbiodistribution profiles are manipulated by encapsulation within, or byconjugation to the carrier. These carrier-based nanomedicines are inherentlymulticomponent systems that contain well-defined nanostructures as the deliveryvehicle, one or more active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) as thetherapeutic agent, and sometimes stealth and/or bioactive moieties to prolongcirculation and to facilitate preferential accumulation at target sites. Inmost cases, each component is developed individually, and then combined to forma nanomedicine through a series of formulation procedures and conjugationmethods. Although many of these nano-formulated medicines have shown muchimproved in vivo efficacy relative to that of the free drugs in animal models,further optimization of these nanomedicines to achieve the desiredpharmacokinetic profile has proven challenging due to the interdependence ofeach individual component. This difficulty in improving and optimizingnanomedicine formulations is regarded as one of the major hurdles for thedevelopment of clinically useful nanomedicines for more effective cancertreatments. One possible solution could be to blur the line between the carrierand the drug by optimizing the nanomedicine construct as one integral component.In this presentation, I will detail our rational design of monodisperse,amphiphilic anticancer drugs―which we term drug amphiphiles (DAs)―that canspontaneously associate into discrete, stable supramolecular nanostructureswith a high and fixed drug loading. These drug-made nanostructures areessentially one-component nanomedicines (OCNs) because they contain only onetype of chemical substance. Depending on the number and type of the drug in themolecular design, the resulting nanostructures could assume variousmorphologies, such as nanofibers, nanotubes or toroids. Therefore, throughmolecular design of the building units, one could potentially gain control overthe structural features and physicochemical properties of the resultingnanomedicine. Our results also suggest that formation of nanostructuresprovides protection for both the drug and the biodegradable linker from theexternal environment and thus offers a mechanism for controlled release.
Biography
Honggang Cui received a Bachelor’sdegree in Polymer Materials Science and Engineering from the Beijing Universityof Chemical Technology in 1999, a Master’s degree in Materialogy/ChemicalEngineering from Tsinghua University in 2002, and a PhD degree in MaterialsScience and Engineering from the University of Delaware in 2007. He was aPostdoctoral Fellow between 2007 and 2010 in the department of MaterialsScience and Engineering and the Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine atNorthwestern University. He joined the Chemical and Biomolecular EngineeringDepartment at the Johns Hopkins University as Assistant Professor in 2010. Heholds joint appointments in the Department of Oncology and Sidney KimmelComprehensive Cancer Center, and the Center for Nanomedicine of Wilmer EyeInstitute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is currentlyrunning a fully equipped lab for nanoparticle fabrication, peptide synthesisand purification, and cell culture, with the aims of developing peptide-basedsupramolecular nanomaterials for targeted drug delivery, tumor imaging anddiagnosis, and tumor microenvironment mimicking. He is a recipient of the W. W.Smith Charitable Trust Basic Medical Research Grant in Cancer (2012), the NSFCAREER Award (2013), and the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award (2015).
Contact:Prof. Lichen Yin
