Indian nanomedicine leader tells doctoral students: Future is bright

Indian nanomedicine leader tells doctoral students: Future is bright

Date: 07/20/2007

By Susan Salk

An India-based nanomedicine expert offered hopeful predictions for the industry, and its impact on the efficacy of oral drugs during a recent lecture at Northeastern.

Dr. Ravi Kumar, of Nanotechnology-Drug Delivery Group of India, the Department of Pharmaceutics and Center for Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology and the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research described the promise of nanoparticles in drug-delivery performance to a group of IGERT Nanomedicine Science and Technology Program students during a lecture on experiments with hypertension, cancer and arthritis treatments.

IGERT – Northeastern�s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program – was funded by the National Cancer Institute and National Science Foundation to provide doctoral education in nanomedicine for the next generation of scientists and technologists.

In his talk “Nanomedicines: The Promise of Nanoparticles in Oral Drug Delivery,” Kumar illustrated the results of experiments showing the promise nanoparticles hold for improving the performance of conventional medicines.

Kumar said the new technology, though lacking a deep history, shows great promise in maintaining concentration levels of drugs in the bloodstream, a traditionally challenging area with current drugs.

“The maintenance of drug levels in plasma without too much fluctuation is a big problem” with conventional drugs, he said. “This is the reason oral drugs require (a patient) take multiple pills per day.”

In addition to maintaining steadier levels of drugs in the patient, nanotechnology carriers are also designed to help overcome difficulties related to drug absorption, low solubility of drugs, and difficulties in the gastrointestinal environment that degrades content, he said.

“Oral drugs are the most preferred treatment, but there are lots of hurdles with these drugs related to binding, metabolism” and other issues, he noted.

Kumar�s research has focused mainly on ways of improving treatments for drug toxicity, hypertension, cancer, diabetes and arthritis. Working with Cyclosporine, he has studied ways of sustaining the drug level in patients with arthritis, and also worked toward developing biodegradable nanoparticles for drug delivery. A bright spot is laboratory evidence that nanoparticles allow for less toxic dosing of the drug, he said.

Other research has focused on the use of Coenzyme Q10 in the treatment of hypertension. Laboratory testing found that initial treatments were successful in temporarily reducing blood pressure in rats, but that after 15 days of treatment, hypertension returned to unhealthful levels, he said.

In explaining the scope of his research, he stressed the importance of keeping the description simple.

“No matter how complicated your research is, it needs to be simplified so it can be presented to the pharmacology industry” for funding, he said.

Source: The Northeastern Voice