ABSTRACT: Nanotechnology offers highly customizable platforms for producing minimally invasive and programmable strategies to diagnose and treat cancer. Advances in this field have demonstrated that nanoparticles can enhance specificity of anti-cancer agents, respond to tumour-specific cues, and direct the visualization of biological targets in vivo.
However, the engineering of nanoparticles for effective delivery to solid tumours remains a critical challenge to cancer nanomedicine. With less than 5% of administered nanoparticles reaching the tumour, a deeper understanding of the interplay between the physicochemical properties of nanomaterials and tumour biology is necessary. This talk will explore how nanoparticle size and functionalization with cancer cell specific agents impact nanoparticle delivery to tumours. We will also discuss how tumour structure evolves with growth and how such changes modulate nanoparticle accumulation. These topics establish key design considerations to tailor nanoparticles for enhanced tumour targeting. Taken further, these concepts also form a fundamental framework that can be used to personalize nanomedicine according to desired function or patient-specific disease states in the future.
Bio-sketch: Edward A. Sykes has been focused on examining nanoparticle interactions with biological systems to develop engineering principles for building disease diagnostic and treatment nanotechnologies. He received his doctoral training in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto under the mentorship of Dr. Warren C.W. Chan. He has obtained awards such as NSERC’s Alexander Graham Bell Fellowship (CGS-D) and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology. His research has been recognized in high impact journals such as ACS Nano and Nature Communications, and has also garnered international media attention. Building on the successes of his PhD work, he intends to initiate a faculty research program that engineers novel nanotechnologies and platforms to identify and modulate the upstream drivers of disease to prevent the development of illnesses.