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Columns::October 28, 2002
Spreading the wealth: University announces plans to buy, sell properties
Open-enrollment period under way for health insurance
Hollowell to receive honorary degree at Commencement
Four named Fellows by American Academy of Advancement of Science
Dedication is held at new Center for Applied Genetic Technologies
Dunning announces leadership changes at Georgia Center
Senior public service associate makes workplaces work better
Administrative Changes
Kudos
Trying times
Into an artist’s world
Campus News
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| An associate professor of pharmaceutics and a member of the Faculty of Engineering, Robert Lu has been working on cell receptors and studying the differences between certain receptors for cancer cells versus those of normal cells. |
Special delivery
Professor works to improve efficacy of cancer drugs
By Alan Flurry
aflurry@engr.uga.edu
These days, it is unfortunately common for someone battling cancer to face an equally devastating set of conditions brought on by the treatments for the disease, like chemotherapy.
As grateful as humanity is for these advances that have resulted in longer, meaningful lives for cancer survivors, researchers like UGA’s Robert Lu are trying to improve the delivery of cancer drugs, both to improve their efficacy and to cut down on their toxicity in the body.
Lu, an associate professor of pharmaceutics in the College of Pharmacy and a member of the Faculty of Engineering, has been working on cell receptors and studying the differences between certain receptors for cancer cells versus those of normal cells. Once that difference has been established, he will use it for drug targeting.
“Nowadays, most available cancer drugs are toxic,” he says, “killing both the tumor and the normal cells, as well.”
The focus of Lu’s work is a low-density lipoprotein receptor, an integral component of a cell’s mechanism for acquiring the cholesterol it needs to grow. Because cancer cells grow so fast, they need more cholesterol and hence have an elevated level of LDL receptors. Thus, Lu is using the LDL receptor to try to deliver drugs specifically to cancer cells.
At its core, pharmaceutics is about developing vehicles for effective delivery of drugs--through controlled release and selective delivery, as well as through traditional methods using tables and suspensions--and these are in fact engineering issues.
Much of Lu’s research is also closely tied to nanotechnology, as drug delivery occurs on a molecular scale; he recently applied for a patent on an artificial lipoprotein.
Lu’s laboratory has received funding from the National Institutes of Health and from pharmaceutical companies, exemplifying the public-private, cross-disciplinary collaboration that is the future for research universities.
Lu is pleased at the development of the Faculty of Engineering at UGA because he believes the instructional potential is as powerful as that for research.
He sees the importance of engineering for his students, for the pharmaceutical industry and for the state of Georgia.
“In the pharmacy school we have pharmacology, medicinal chemistry and so on, but pharmaceutics is closer to engineering than perhaps another field,” he says. “If you think about it, our artificial LDL is really engineering.”
This marriage between pharmaceutics and engineering at UGA is receiving serious attention across the nation. Svein Oie, dean of the college of pharmacy, sees pharmaceutical bio-engineering as a next logical step at UGA.
“Georgia wants to create more jobs in the area of biotechnology, work that requires more extensive education than traditional jobs,” says Oie. “So we need to have the educated workforce to contribute to economic growth by producing graduates who will serve the future expectations of the state.”
Oie and Dale Threadgill, director of the Faculty of Engineering, argue that Georgia’s growth in biotechnology depends on narrowing the gap in industry between engineers and researchers.
Threadgill believes the university’s reputation as a liberal arts institution with strength in biological sciences, genetics, nanotechnology and pharmaceutics will help the new engineering initiative attract the faculty needed to achieve excellence on a national scale.
Last month Oie, Threadgill and other engineering faculty hosted the visit of a scholar from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who served as a consultant to Research Triangle Park in North Carolina in the 1980s. Other visits also are planned, as the initiative takes shape, to clarify the scope of the university’s commitment.
UGA as a biotech center is already a reality in Lu’s lab, as he works, in conjunction with an Atlanta pharmaceutical startup company, to overcome the traditional limitations of cancer treatments with new techniques in precision drug delivery.
His research, and the pharmaceutical engineering it augurs, will let us think far ahead of where we are today.
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