From an article on NNVC's web site:
nanoviricides.com
Nano-Medicine Using Systems Engineering
Dr. Anil R. Diwan (IITB, ‘80, ChemEng)
The low-lying fruits have been harvested - this is true of today’s medicine. Starting from the serendipitous discovery of penicillin to the most recent drugs, there has been one challenge - how to make the drug the most efficacious that it can be? This is the problem that Dr. Diwan is solving. Using his engineering background, he worked out a number of systems challenges that go into making an efficacious drug - from chemistry and manufacturing, to shipping, to Pharmacist’s manipulations to what happens when the drug enters the body - does it go to the right place? How to make it go into the cell where it needs to do its work?
Dissolving Wax in Water!
The recent active ingredients that Medicinal Chemists and biologists are developing are relatively large, and many of them are not very water soluble. So how do you make them into drugs?
Dr. Diwan pioneered the development of polymeric micelles with pendants, which, because of the unique free energy constraints, self-assemble into flexible nano-scale “droplets” within water. Inside the droplets, his team can hold a number of different types of active ingredients, as true solutions. Dr. Diwan designed these polymeric micelles so that the active ingredients held in the core are transported across cell membranes into the cell, where they need to go.
These nano-scale, self-assembling drug delivery systems are expected to solve the problems of solubility, permeability, and provide enhanced duration of action for many drugs. These materials are far superior to previous approaches including liposomes, because unlike the previous materials and technologies, Dr. Diwan’s polymeric micelles actually deliver the payload into the cells, without spilling the active ingredient in the bloodstream, thus maximizing efficacy and reducing toxic effects. It is like using cluster bombs instead of bullets. Dr. Diwan and his colleagues have shown that encapsulation of active ingredients into these materials improves efficacy of an active ingredient by 1,000% to as much as greater than 10,000% in cell cultures.
Even in animals,limited work has shown improvements by factors of 300% to 500%! Compare that to the mere 10% to 20%enhancements that have made anti-cancer drugs such as Doxil and now Abranex successful. Dr. Diwan and colleagues have been issued a US patent on these novel amphiphilic polymers.
The Elusive “Chemical Virus”
OK, he can dissolve wax in water and force it to deliver payload into cells. But can he deliver it exactly and only to the cancer or pathogen cells to be killed, so that toxic side-effects are minimized?
Not content with the astounding success of his polymeric micelles, this is exactly the next question Anil asked himself. To solve this problem, he turned to Nature and asked, what is the best and yet the simplest, self-assembling and self-organizing system capable of cell-specific targeting that Nature has created? The answer is - a virus! But, of course, we do not want to make an infectious material. So, Dr. Diwan designed, de novo, chemically defined polymeric materials that have all the specific targeting, transport into cell, and disassembly aspects of viruses. And he reasoned, once this novel nano-machine has done its job, it should autodestruct, and not produce any side effects in the process. A tall order indeed. But with the application of basic chemistry, thermodynamics, mathematical modeling, in–cerebro, insilico, modeling and experimentation, he finally produced a family of just such materials. What is more, they are easy to make, inexpensive, and easily scalable. Anil has applied for a patent on these materials. Professor Cy Stein of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a colleague of Dr. Diwan, has dubbed this new family of materials the “elusive chemical virus”!
Anil and his partners have formed a new company, TheraCour Pharma, Inc., with private investor financing to commercialize these materials and also to develop new drugs based on them. Most of their developments are against organisms resistant to existing antibiotics and chemotherapeutics.
Nanomedicine is not a vision anymore, it is reality, and it will be at a clinic near you in a few years! Dr. Diwan is currently President and CEO of TheraCour Pharma, Inc. Anil has been working in naotechnology since 1986, starting with immunogold nanoparticles. He
has been working on polymeric micelles for drug delivery since 1993, when he was the first to propose the use of pendant polymers for this application. Anil holds a Ph.D.
from Rice and a B.Tech. from IITB.
From the PR:[ biz.yahoo.com ]
NanoViricides, Inc. has exclusive license in perpetuity for technologies developed by Theracour Pharma for the five virus types HIV, HCV, Herpes, Asian (bird) flu and Influenza. |
