David Oupicky, Ph.D.  and fellow collaborators, Stephanie Brock, Ph.D. and Shijie Sheng, Ph.D., are prepared to engineer “smart” porous nanoparticles for targeted delivery of cancer fighting drugs into prostate tumors.  According to Oupicky, the process may lead to treatments for a wide variety of other types of cancer.

Dr. Oupicky, associate professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, along with fellow project collaborators, Stephanie Brock, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Chemistry, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Shijie Sheng, Ph.D., Department of Pathology, School of Medicine, received $403,000 from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health for their proposal, “Hollow Porous Silica Nanoparticles for Targeted Drug Delivery.”

It is anticipated that novel nanoparticles developed in this project will establish a new drug delivery platform suitable for a variety of biomedical applications.  Because of design flexibility, hybrid inorganic-organic nanoparticles is particularly suitable for imaging and drug delivery.  Early application to a clinically relevant problem will allow fast progession of this nanotechnology platform to application in cancer treatment.

Initial funding for this project came from the President’s Research Enhancement Fund in 2005.  Drs. Oupicky and Brock were grant recipients of this program, and this new external funding exemplifies the impact of WSU’s research stimulation through important internal funding programs can and does payoff!