Register here to attend the lecture: Alumni Lecture Registration
Alumni Lectures feature Chemistry at Illinois alumni who have, with the foundation of their chemistry studies at Illinois, made a meaningful impact in their chosen field.
Dr. Daniel Heller
Head, Cancer Nanomedicine Laboratory
Member, Molecular Pharmacology Program, Sloan Kettering Institute
Co-Director and Professor, The Pat and Ian Cook Doctoral Program in Cancer Engineering
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Professor, Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine
Ph.D. (Strano), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, '10
B.A. in History, Rice University, '00
Nanochemistry for the Research, Detection, and Treatment of Cancer
Tuesday, September 3, 2024
4 pm
Noyes Laboratory 217
Light refreshments provided
*This lecture is open to all students, postdocs, faculty, and staff*
Abstract
We develop nanomaterials to accelerate the research, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer and allied diseases. These include nanotherapeutics to translocate tissue barriers via targeted drug delivery strategies and optical nanosensor technologies to facilitate the research, diagnosis, and monitoring of disease.
Precision oncology aims drugs at many different therapeutic targets, but developers of nanotherapeutics for targeted drug delivery often face difficulty when encapsulating payloads with diverse structures.
We developed methods to facilitate the encapsulation of many drug classes into nanoparticles, based on drug molecular structure, facilitating the rapid synthesis of diverse nanotherapeutics. We found that P-selectin, expressed endogenously on activated endothelium in tumors, can be used as a nanotherapeutic target improve the efficacy of precision therapies and to abrogate dose-limiting toxicities, to improve overall therapeutic index. P-selectin can be induced via ionizing radiation, enabling target enhancement in tumors. We found that endothelial targeting can improve delivery across intact blood-brain barrier for the treatment of intracranial tumors and metastases, by activating transendothelial transport.
We develop optical nanosensor technologies using carbon nanotubes to facilitate the screening, diagnosis, and monitoring of diseases, and to build new assays for cancer drug development. These technologies employ the bandgap fluorescence of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) which emit in the near-infrared “tissue transparent” window and can respond to analytes down to the single-molecule level. We have developed new sensors for the detection of metabolic changes in live cells and tissues, as well as a liquid biopsy platform for the detection of diseases in the absence of known biomarkers, via an optical nanosensor array that collects large response data sets, processed by machine learning algorithms.
Bio
Dr. Daniel A. Heller, PhD, is Head of the Cancer Nanomedicine Laboratory, Member of the Molecular Pharmacology Program, and Co-Director of The Pat and Ian Cook Doctoral Program in Cancer Engineering at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, as well as Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Heller obtained his PhD in chemistry from the University of Illinois in 2010 and a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in the laboratory of Robert Langer at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT in 2012. He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications and is an inventor on over 20 pending or issued patents. His work focuses on the development of nanoscale technologies for the research, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer.