PROJECT TITLE	A Bio-mimetic, Self-contained Drug Delivery System
CATEGORY	Cancer, Drug Delivery
PROJECT  DESCRIPTION	We live in a time of vast knowledge about how the human body works at the level of individual cells and tissues.  We often know what has gone wrong in the cell machinery that causes disease, and what synthetic or natural molecule would repair the damage.   An ideal drug delivery system would be a microscopic non-toxic bubble with the repair molecule locked inside that would specifically attach only to diseased cells and release the molecule inside the cell to make the repair.  A virus is nature’s model of such a delivery system.  The goal of this project is to construct and test a simple version of a delivery system that mimics what a virus does, but without the infectiousness of the virus itself, and with few or no side effects.  This “bio-mimetic” (life mimicking) delivery system would allow quick modification to deliver a wide range of molecules to any number of cell types damaged by almost any type of disease.
INVESTIGATORS	Ilya Koltover, PhD
CO-FUNDERS	Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Northwestern University
INSTITUTION	Northwestern University                                                                   Materials Science and Engineering Department                                       2036 Cook Hall, 2225 N. Campus Drive                                            Evanston, IL 60208
STATUS	Project began April 2003