CIMIT Summer Education Series 2010 Explores Novel Technologies and Applications for Therapeutic Delivery of Drugs and Molecules

At the recent CIMIT Summer Education Series, Harvard Professor Jeff Karp demonstrated the potential to deliver cells to specific tissues through the circulation via a chemical engineering approach.

Learn more about the CIMIT Summer Education Series 2010: Emerging Technologies and Applications for Therapeutic Delivery of Drugs and Molecules: http://www.cimit.org/forum-educationseries.html

Comments

[Samantha Farrell]

During the month of July, I have had the opportunity to attend the 2010 CIMIT Summer Education Series focusing on emerging technologies and applications for therapeutic delivery of drugs and molecules. This educational series has opened my eyes to the potential impact that novel drug delivery and drug/device combination therapy will have on future therapeutics.

The educational series was a great success, and each Tuesday, the Colloquium Room in Boston University’s Photonics center was packed with graduate students from MIT, Boston University, Harvard and Northeastern, professors, doctors, scientists, and industry workers eager to listen to the expert lecturers.

The lecturers discussed wealth of potential applications of novel drug delivery and drug/device combination therapy. In the future, new types of drugs could silence genes, target specific sites in the body, and be administered continuously based on the needs of the patients. Novel drug delivery will optimize safety and effectiveness while minimizing costs, and it is estimated that the global market for advanced drug delivery systems is over 135 billion dollars. There applications of novel drug delivery to numerous branches of medicine including immunology, pulmonary, neurology, and cardiology, and it has the potential to treat diseases including arthritis, glioblastoma, diabetes, and cancer.

The goal of the educational series was to link current and evolving technologies with unmet clinical needs through lecturers by expert scientists and clinician leaders who are developing new technologies and translating them into clinical solutions. The educational series epitomized CIMIT’s interdisciplinary nature. Novel drug delivery is a highly interdisciplinary field, and engineers and clinician were brought together for collaboration during the series. The lecturers, regardless of whether he or she was a scientist, engineer, or clinician discussed topics from each of the perspectives.