An AAPS Foundation fellowship recipient shares her research on cancer treatment.
Dandan Luo is a recipient of the 2017 AAPS Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship. Dandan is a graduate student at the University of Buffalo, SUNY, working under the guidance of Jonathan F. Lovell, Ph.D. With the support of the AAPS Foundation, Dandan can continue passionately researching doxorubicin encapsulated in porphyrin-phospholipid (PoP) for chemophototherapy of solid tumors.
My passion is in the medical field, and development of innovative drugs to cure diseases fascinates me. Cancer is a global health care burden. It appears to me that more and more people near me are suffering from cancer, and effective cancer treatment options are in great need.
My doctoral research involves the use of light-activated liposomal drugs for treatment of pancreatic cancer and breast cancer. I believe using near infrared (NIR) light is a brilliant way to treat cancer. We observed 6–10-fold enhancement of drug accumulation in the tumor region post laser irradiation. When I first joined the lab, we were trying to figure out the mechanism of the enhanced drug accumulation. We tried many ways to test our hypothesis and found out that laser together with photosensitizer would permeabilize tumor vasculature, which plays an important role in the enhanced drug accumulation.
Later on, my effort focused on developing an optimal formulation for the doxorubicin loaded porphyrin-phospholipid (PoP) liposomes. I prepared numerous formulations and studied how each lipid component would affect the stability and light-triggered release rate and studied the light-triggered release mechanisms. I was able to finalize a formulation that was very stable in circulation and released the encapsulated drugs rapidly upon NIR light. My current research efforts are in the investigation of the efficacy and safety profiles of this treatment on various rodent models. In vivo characterization of laser dose and drug-light interval were ongoing under the guidance of pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) modeling and simulation.
I hope this work can have successful clinical translation and finally benefit cancer patients. Currently, a start-up company (PoP Biotech) was formed based on the light-activated technology. Dox-PoP liposomes also entered the Nanotechnology Characterization Lab program, which is intended to facilitate clinical translation. A lot more efforts are required for this technology to be successful.
I believe this fellowship is a great encouragement for me in the pharmaceutical sciences field. I plan to use the fellowship to gain more training in the field of PK/PD modeling and simulation through courses and projects.