February 15, 2019
The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy is pleased to present distinguished lecturer Samir Mitragotri, PhD, on Thursday, April 11 at 10:30 a.m. in B050 of the James Cancer Hospital. Mitragotri’s talk, “Understanding and Overcoming Biological Barriers for Drug Delivery,” is part of the college’s Distinguished Lecture Series.
Mitragotri is the Hiller Professor of Bioengineering and Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. He is the author of over 250 publications, an inventor on over 170 patents/patent applications and a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher.
Mitragotri’s research has advanced the fundamental understanding of biological barriers and has led to the development of new materials and technologies for diagnosis and treatment of various ailments including diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular diseases and skin conditions and infections, among others. Many of his technologies have advanced to human clinical studies and products. Fundamental understanding developed through his research has also advanced the understanding of the biology of barriers in the human body. His research has made a particular impact on transdermal drug delivery, oral drug delivery, bio-inspired drug delivery and bio-synthetic hybrid systems for drug delivery and immunotherapy.
In his talk, Mitragotri will discuss the problem of effective delivery of drugs in today’s health care. At a fundamental level, the challenge of drug delivery reflects the fact that the drug distribution in the body is limited by the body’s natural metabolic processes and transport barriers. These biological barriers, while serving an important purpose of regulating the body’s metabolic functions, limit the drug that ultimately reaches the target site. Accordingly, many drugs fail to reach their full therapeutic potential. Mitragotri’s research aims at developing an understanding of the body’s key biological barriers such as skin, intestinal epithelium and the immune system, and utilizing this understanding to develop novel means to negotiate these barriers to deliver drugs. He will present an overview of the lessons learned from his exploration of these biological barriers.
An elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Inventors, Mitragotri received his BS in Chemical Engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology in India, and his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mitragotri is the Editor-in-Chief of American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ and the Society for Biological Engineering’s new journal, Bioengineering and Translational Medicine. He is also a foreign member of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Controlled Release Society (CRS), the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS).