"Drug Delivery Nanotechnology: Maximizing Efficacy in Therapeutic Interventions"
Dr. Ashok Kakkar (McGill)

One of the key challenges posed by the ever increasing complexity of diseases, is our inability to intervene with the arsenal of highly potent pharmaceutical agents that is at our disposal, at the right place, right time, and with right therapeutic dose. There has been tremendous effort devoted to developing what are now commonly referred to as nanocarriers that can help us overcome physicochemical obstacles in their delivery. Lessons learnt from these studies have necessitated a shift in paradigm to combine multiple functions into a single scaffold of a nanostructure. An important parameter for constructing multi-tasking scaffolds is to develop tools, which can be utilized to assemble multivalent structures with desired spatial distribution of therapeutic, stealth, imaging and targeting capabilities. The synthetic methodologies need to be simple and highly versatile, and applicable to a variety of nanoarchitectures. We shall elaborate on the evolution of macromolecule based nanotechnology, demonstrate how one can easily construct multivalent nanoconjugates of desired structural complexity that can perform multiple tasks and help visualize drug delivery, and discuss their potential in smart and efficient therapeutic interventions

He is the guest of Dr. John Oh
and a Guest Speaker at the Chemistry and Biochemistry Graduate Research Conference