Nanoparticles—tiny particles a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair—are of intense interest to cancer researchers, and have many potential applications.
A leading researcher in the emerging field of nanomedicine, Gang Bao was recruited to the Rice University George R. Brown School of Engineering department of bioengineering with the help of a Recruitment of Established Investigators Award from CPRIT. Previously, Bao was an endowed professor of bioengineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, and the director of three nanomedicine research centers there.
Bao is interested in developing new nanoparticle-based technologies that can be used to help treat cancer as well as diagnose it.
A nanoparticle formulation he has developed, based on magnetic iron oxide, could potentially be injected into a tumor and used to destroy it. After injection, an alternating magnetic field applied for an hour to a patient’s body would heat the nanoparticles just enough to destroy cancer cells. The type of cancer Bao thinks would most benefit from this type of hyperthermia treatment is pancreatic cancer, for which there are few treatment options, and which usually kills patients within six months of diagnosis.
The nanoparticles are not toxic to the patient. After killing cancer cells, most of them travel to the liver, where they are broken down into iron and oxygen, which can be used by the body.
For diagnostic purposes, iron oxide nanoparticles serve as an MRI contrast agent. They can be coated with a radiotracer that helps tumors show up better on different kinds of imaging, like fluorescence or PET scans.
Nanoparticles can also be used to bump up the sensitivity of assays of tumor biomarkers. “Some of those biomarkers in the blood have very low concentrations,” he says, “so we need to have a very sensitive method to detect them.”
So far, Bao has only tested his nanoparticles in animals. He hopes to apply for FDA approval for a small-scale clinical trial, which he would conduct with colleagues at MD Anderson Cancer center.
Bao is also collaborating with colleagues at MD Anderson on combining nanoparticles with targeted CRISPR/Cas9 technology to alter the tumor microenvironment.
Bao says that the move to Houston and the money from CPRIT enabled him to focus his nanomaterials research on cancer in ways that he was not able to do in Georgia. For Bao, the interest in cancer is personal. His maternal grandparents, as well as all of his mother’s eight siblings, suffered—and all but one died—from cancer.
He finds his proximity to the medical community in Houston allows him to collaborate closely with clinicians and will facilitate the translation of his research. Located in the Texas Medical Center, Bao has access to a certified GMP (Good Manufacturing Process) facility, which is required for larger-scale nanoparticle manufacture for clinical applications.
Bao founded a company, called iLISATech, Inc., to scale up the production of iron-oxide nanoparticles for use in a clinical trial, as well as to commercialize and sell to other research laboratories and companies.
Bao studied mechanical engineering and applied mechanics at Shandong University in China, where he received his undergraduate and master’s degrees. He received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Lehigh University. He was associate professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech and Emory in 1999.
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