Md. Jashim Uddin, Ph.D., has received the Phi Beta Psi national research award for the second time. There has been a significant interest in personalized medicine to the approaches that can result in a nanotechnology capable of diagnosis and drug delivery to monitoring therapeutic response in real time for a cure for cancer, an unmet medical need today.
Strategies for detecting molecular biomarkers associated with initiation of cancer can facilitate early detection and timely surgical or therapeutic intervention of carcinogenesis, reports Vanderbilt School of Medicine Basic Sciences.
The discovery that COX-2 is expressed in colon polyps and colon cancers at higher levels than in normal tissue was recapitulated in solid tumors from many other organs. Mechanistic studies indicate that COX-2-generated prostaglandins regulate multiple tumor phenotypes including proliferation, resistance to apoptosis, cell motility, and angiogenesis, which makes COX-2 an ideal target for molecular imaging and targeted chemotherapy of carcinogenesis.
Now, the second Phi Beta Psi fund ($77,028) has been awarded to Uddin for the development of a nanotechnology in which disease diagnosis and therapy are combined. Today, the call for personalized medicine demands a new nanoplatform for the simultaneous delivery of both imaging and therapeutic agents to pre-neoplastic or neoplastic tissues for imaging to be performed not only before or after, but also during a treatment procedure. This project is uniquely built for image-guided intervention of colorectal carcinogenesis.
