Pathology Presents: Targeted Nanoparticles for Overcoming Barriers in Cancer Therapy

Speaker

Forrest Kievit, PhD
Research Assistant Professor
Department of Neurological Surgery
University of Washington

Faculty Sponsor

Eddie Fox, PhD

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Description

Why Attend?

Targeted Nanoparticles for Overcoming Barriers in Cancer Therapy

Nanotechnology provides a flexible platform for the development of effective therapeutic nanomaterials that can interact specifically with a target in a biological system and provoke a desired biological response. The body is a highly complex system that imposes multiple physiological and cellular barriers to foreign objects. Thus, the success of a therapeutic nanoparticle largely relies on proper design parameters that render the ability to bypass these barriers and accumulate in target tissue. Our work focuses on the development of nanomedicines to overcome current limitations in cancer therapy to improve standard of care. These limitations include the non-specificity of therapy that can harm healthy tissue, the difficulty in delivering nucleic acids for gene therapy, and the formation of drug and radio resistance. In this talk, the design considerations required of therapeutic nanoparticles will be introduced including engineering strategies to overcome biological barriers. I will pull examples from our work from initial concept of the nanoparticle to pre-clinical testing of efficacy in mouse models to highlight design parameters.