Vladimir Torchilin |
Kim Lewis |
Two Northeastern researchers have each received significant grants to develop cutting-edge methods of fighting disease.
Vladimir Torchilin, professor and chair of pharmaceutical sciences, was awarded a five-year $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute to investigate ways of improving nanocarrier-based pharmaceuticals for drug and gene therapy.
And biology professor Kim Lewis received a $100,000 Grand Challenges Explorations grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to find a way to isolate and observe cells taken from a latent form of tuberculosis that is asymptomatic and highly resistant to treatment.
Torchilin, director of Northeastern’s Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and Nanomedicine, is an expert in drug-delivery systems that treat cancer and other diseases by deploying nanoparticles that transport drugs or DNA to targeted cells.
Under this new grant, Torchilin will seek to improve the process of getting pharmaceutical agents into cells, identifying targets inside cells, and ensuring that drugs or DNA inside cells are able to function properly.
Lewis, with the help of the Gates Foundation grant, will work on a way to make latent M. tuberculosis cells stand out from nonlatent cells, thus enabling their observation, capture, and study. The effort is crucial because most people infected with M. tuberculosis carry the latent form of the pathogen, and 10 percent go on to develop an acute, contagious form of the disease.
This is the second Gates Foundation grant for Lewis, director of Northeastern’s Antimicrobial Drug Discovery Center. The first, a $750,000 award received in summer 2007, was for studying what Lewis terms “persister cells”—tuberculosis cells that seem impervious to antibiotics.