November 14, 2022
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded PhD candidate Jacob Ramsey a fellowship grant for his project “Drug Retention and Tumor Distribution of Polymeric Micelles for Cancer Therapy.” Ramsey, the Lead PI on the project is aided by his mentor, Professor Alexander “Sasha” Kabanov.
“The goal of this project is to understand how drug encapsulation in polymeric micelle nanoparticles improves the delivery of drugs to tumors,” said Ramsey. “Here we seek to understand what principles govern drug retention in polymeric micelles, which is essential to tumor delivery and will help ensure the efficient development and translation of these promising drug delivery systems in the future.”
The grant from NCI awards Ramsey two years of PhD support and four years of Post-Doctoral Support to transition into an independent investigator.
“This funding will support my dissertation research where I will investigate polymer-drug interactions and how they influence the pharmacokinetics of the drugs and tumor exposure,” said Ramsey. “These studies will be used to develop pharmacokinetic models of polymeric micelles and improve our understanding of these unique nanocarriers.”
“In the future, we hope the assays and models we develop measuring incorporating the strength of polymer-drug interactions can be used to advance these formulations in the clinic. Eventually, we want to expand this work to include polymer-nucleic acid complexes for gene delivery,” said Ramsey.
“It feels nice to know that the reviewers see the value in this work and agree that it is impactful in the field of cancer therapy moving forward.” said Ramsey. “The proposal is a little ambitious, so I am eager and excited to get started.”
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