What can nanotechnology offer medicine? While research on cancer and other lethal diseases is ongoing, current cancer treatments encounter many challenges as diseased cells develop resistance, patients respond differently to treatments, or therapies kill not only diseased cells but also other healthy cells. Dr. Tamara Minko, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Pharmaceutics at Rutgers University, develops personalized, nanoscale-based targeted delivery of drugs that can be combined with other treatments to increase its effectiveness. In order to target cancer cells and treat diseases like cancer and fibrosis for which treatment options are very limited, Dr. Minko uses a complex approach: combination of nanomedicine and gene therapy to suppress the mechanisms that cause the development of these diseases. Ultimately, Dr. Minko hopes that her treatment approaches of hardly curable and highly lethal diseases will improve the overall health and wellbeing of an entire society.

Due to many side effects of anti-cancer drugs, patients often have to stop medication and risk further development of cancer. To address this problem, Dr. Minko collaborates with Rutgers New Jersey Cancer Institute, and develops effective treatment strategies that are now ready for clinical trials. An author and co-author of more than 400 publications including peer-reviewed papers, books and textbook chapters, conference proceedings, abstracts, and patents, Dr. Minko is an influential figure in the medical society, and many of her papers are well cited and published in prestigious journals with high impact factors including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Nature Nanotechnology, Cancer Research, and ACS Nano, to name a few. Dr. Minko is also the Executive Editor of Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews, Editor of Pharmaceutical Research, member of Editorial Boards of 11 scientific journals and several national and international review panels. Currently, Dr. Minko’s team and her collaborators from the Cancer Institute have submitted a few patent applications, and possesses all required preclinical data for clinical trials of their treatment approaches.

Current research includes:

• Targeted Delivery Specific to Cancer Cells: Dr. Minko investigates complex drugs with specific targeting peptides that will be delivered only to cancer cells, making treatment more effective and decreasing adverse side effects of chemotherapy. Patented in 2002 and first published in a paper in 2003, the use of LHRH-peptide as a special target helps make effective treatments that are specific to certain types of cancer cells.
• Nanotechnology Approach for Multicomponent Delivery of Drugs: Dr. Minko and her team are developing multifunctional treatments that combine nucleic acids and peptides that will be delivered into the same cell to influence multiple mechanisms at work and therefore more effectively treat the disease. For example, by using these special nanoparticles, Dr. Minko hopes to inhibit mechanisms responsible for metastasis and cellular resistance, delivered at the same time to the same location as the treatment itself.
• Personalized Treatment of Cancer: This new project that is now going to clinical trial was designed to use for facilitate care for individual patients. In strong collaboration with the Rutgers New Jersey Cancer Institute who provides samples from patients post-surgery, Dr. Minko and her team identify individual mechanisms of the development of drug resistance and metastases and determine which proteins must be suppressed and which specific treatment should be used for each patient. As treatments do not work for patients equally, Dr. Minko continues to find ways to personalize medicine for each patient, thus increasing efficacy.