The presentation, titled "Systematic Evaluation of the Toxicity of Carbon-coated and Non-coated Copper and Nickel Nanoparticles," will be held in Kerr Hall, room 1001, at 4:00 p.m.
]]>Registration will be open until Friday, March 13. Registration fee is $7 per
person and includes a continental breakfast. Fees must be postmarked by
Monday, March 16. There will be an additional $20 fee for late registration.
Children 8 and under are free.
Click here for more information and to register.
Zhang is the Robert A. Harris Professor and chair of the Department
of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Indiana University. His
research interests include chemical biology, signaling mediated by
tyrosine dephosphorylation, targeting protein tyrosine phosphatases
for the treatment of cancer, diabetes/obesity, autoimmune disorders,
and infectious diseases.
The seminar will be held from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. in Kerr Hall, room 2001.
]]>Pu's presentation is titled "Quantitative Nanostructure-Activity Relationships (QNAR)." The seminar will be held in Beard Hall, room 116.
]]>The grant will support Xiao's project, "Myostatin Inhibition in DMD Dogs by Gene Transfer." Muscular dystrophies are genetic diseases characterized by progressive muscle wasting. Duchenne muscular dystrophy occurs when a genetic mutation prevents the production of dystrophin, an essential muscle protein. Without this protein, individuals with DMD experience progressive loss of muscle strength and usually die in their twenties from respiratory or cardiac failure. There is currently no effective treatment for DMD, which affects approximately one out of every 3,500 boys worldwide.
In this NIH funded project, Xiao’s team will use a new approach to promote muscle growth and curb muscle wasting by means of gene therapy. They will deliver a therapeutic gene that blocks the action of the protein myostatin. Myostatin is produced by skeletal muscles to limit their growth and size. By blocking myostatin, normal muscles as well as dystrophic muscles will grow larger and stronger, Xiao says.
Xiao will deliver the myostatin-blocker gene to DMD dogs who have similar clinical symptoms as seen in the DMD patients in hope that muscle wasting will be reversed or halted.
"If this strategy works for DMD, it may also work for other forms of muscle-wasting diseases," he says.
Xiao is collaborating on the project with with Joe Kornegay, DVM, PhD, in the UNC School of Medicine.
Xiao's research group is also working to genetically engineer a nonpathogenic and defective DNA virus, named adeno-associate virus. They remove the original genes from the AAV and replace them with other genes, turning the virus into a twenty-two-nanometer delivery truck that ferries therapeutic genes to a variety of cells, tissues, and even the whole body. In addition to being efficienct, AAV has also proven to be very safe. Xiao has developed AAV-based treatments for diseases such as muscular dystrophies, heart failure, diabetes, arthritis, hepatitis, and cancer. A first-of-its-kind gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy is in a phase I clinical trial.
]]>Kim is an assistant professor of medicine and genetics at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. His presentation is titled "Genetically Engineered Mouse Models: Uses and Limitations."
The seminar will be held in Beard Hall, room 116.
]]>The defense will be held in Beard Hall, room 116, at 9:00 a.m.
Cheung's dissertation is titled "Antibody Carriers of CpG
Oligodeoxynucleotides for Solid Tumor Immunotherapy".
A draft of the manuscript is available for viewing in Kerr Hall,
room 1316. All are invited to attend, and all graduate students
are required to attend.
The paper, "Kinetic Considerations for the Quantitative Assessment of Efflux Activity and Inhibition: Implications for Understanding and Predicting the Effects of Efflux Inhibition," proposed a new way of analyzing data from experiments that examine how drugs move through the body.
"In the old days, we used to believe drugs moved passively through the body, diffusing from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration," Pollack says. "Now we know that proteins play an active role in transporting drug molecules. However, the methods we were using analyze data related to movement, or flux, were rigid and standardized and, we believed, wrong."
Pollack credits his coauthor, John Corey Kalvass, PhD, a former graduate student in Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics who now works for Eli Lilly, with developing the new mathematical model that more accurately describes drug movement, or flux.
"What we were saying in this paper flew in the face of established practice. We were telling very distinguished scientists that they were wrong," Pollack says. "This award is gratifying because it was such a big jump from proposing the idea to having it accepted and, finally, to best paper."
Pollack is the executive associate dean of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy.
]]>The seminar, titled "Characterization and In-Vitro Evaluation of the
Potential Toxicity of Commercially Available Nanoparticles",
will be held from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. in Kerr Hall, room 1001.
The seminar, titled "Simple cervical cancer vaccine and dependence
of chirality of the adjuvant on vaccine activity", will be held from
3:00 to 4:30 p.m. in Kerr Hall, room 1001.
Peppas is a professor of chemical engineering, biomedical engineering and pharmacy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also serves as the Fletcher Stuckey Pratt Chair in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. His presentation, titled "Intelligent Biomaterials for Protein Delivery, Molecular Imprinting and Recognitive Medical Devices," will begin at 10:00 a.m. in the auditorium of the Tate-Turner-Kuralt Building.
]]>Samuel Lai, PhD, an assistant professor in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, had his project selected as one of sixty-five grants announced by the Gates Foundation in the fifth funding round of Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative to help scientists around the world explore bold and largely unproven ways to improve health in developing countries. The grants were provided to scientists in sixteen countries on five continents.
To receive funding, Lai showed in a two-page application how his idea falls outside current scientific paradigms and might lead to significant advances in global health. The initiative is highly competitive, receiving more than 2,400 proposals in this round.
“Fighting viruses after they have reached their targets for infection is like trying to defend a castle by locking the interior doors but leaving the gate open,” Lai said. “We can fend off viruses much better if we could just close the front gate.”
Most infections do not begin in the blood or enter through undamaged skin. Instead, they are transmitted at exposed mucosal surfaces such as the pulmonary, gastrointestinal and reproductive tracts, Lai said. That makes mucus—the slimy and sticky secretions that line mucosal surfaces—the first line of defense against pathogens such as viruses. Despite the importance of mucous membranes in protecting against foreign substances, few people have thought to take advantage of mucus in developing methods to prevent infections, Lai said.
“Even though viruses must penetrate mucus to infect our body, how viruses behave in mucus has often been ignored,” he said. “Perhaps it is because some consider it to be yucky or gross.”
By better understanding how viruses can be trapped in mucus secretions, Lai says he believes it might be possible to develop better methods pf preventing the spread of infections by, for example, developing new microbicides or improving the effectiveness of vaccines.
Finding better ways to block infections is of particular importance because many viral infections, such as HIV and herpes, cannot be cured once established, Lai said. Together with Richard Cone, PhD, a professor of biophysics at Johns Hopkins University, Lai will explore whether it is possible to protect against infections in animals by trapping and immobilizing viruses and other pathogens in the mucus secretions.
The Gates Foundation will initially fund the project for one year for $100,000. If Lai and his team can show progress in the lab, the funding could continue and increase tenfold.
Grand Challenges Explorations is a five-year, $100 million initiative of the Gates Foundation to promote innovation in global health. The program uses an agile, streamlined grant process – applications are limited to two pages, and preliminary data are not required. Proposals are reviewed and selected by a committee of foundation staff and external experts, and grant decisions are made within approximately three months of the close of the funding round.
The next round of Grand Challenges Explorations will open in March 2011. More information, including grant application instructions and a list of topics for which proposals will be accepted, will be available at www.grandchallenges.org/explorations.
]]>Technology transfer officials at three University of North Carolina System campuses are dividing $250,000 to advance the commercial development of discoveries made at their universities. Technology Enhancement Grants of $50,000 each will support the advancement of five inventions with significant market potential.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, Henry Nowack and Jackie Quay, PhD, both assistant directors of the Office of Technology Development, are recipients of the two $50,000 grants. Quay is working to commercialize Huang’s work relating to the safety and effectiveness of siRNAs, which are novel, biodegradable nanoparticles used to deliver various therapies. Nowak is assisting in the preclinical development and characterization of neuroamides, a new class of therapies discovered by Kohn for the treatment of epilepsy and diabetic neuropathy.
These Technology Enhancement Grants provide a maximum of $50,000 to a technology transfer specialist at a North Carolina university or other research institution. The grants fund research studies that are designed to achieve commercial milestones as defined by businesses interested in licensing the resulting technologies.
These awards differ from typical academic research grants in that they support commercially driven studies and are awarded to technology transfer officers responsible for licensing the invention rights, rather than to the inventors themselves.
The biotech center holds up the grant furthering Huang’s technology as an example of how well the program works. Positive preliminary data obtained through the grant funding earlier this year has resulted in the licensing of the technology to Qualiber, Inc, a spinoff company in Chapel Hill.
The company will develop Huang’s technology as a means to harness the as of yet elusive, though potentially highly useful, capabilities of siRNAs to block expression of proteins in the body. Qualiber is developing Huang’s technology that uses nanoparticles to deliver siRNA to specific cells in the body, such as cancer cells in a tumor. Docking the right piece of siRNA onto a specific sweet spot of a gene in cancer cells may silence that gene so it couldn't send out its usual signals attracting blood vessels to the tumor. So the tumor would starve and the cancer would disappear.
Huang is a Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor and chair of the School’s Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics. Kohn is a Kenan Professor in the Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry.
]]>Benhabbour is a research assistant professor in the division. The presentation, titled "Preparation and Characterization of Nickel-Loaded Lipid-Based Nanoparticles for Binding to His-tagged Proteins and Antigens," will be held in Kerr Hall, room 1001, at 4:00 p.m.
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