Current Projects

Immunotherapy stimulates the immune system and helps to induce effective anti-tumor activity. This could be achieved by stimulating dendritic cells, the key antigen presenting cells to capture tumor antigens that are released from tumor cells and cross present these antigens to T cells. However, poor clinical success is obtained with antigen alone. Thus the necessity of a therapeutic tool in combination with antigen is required to halt the tumor progression through effective identification of non-self antigens. This in vivo concept of therapeutic vaccination strategy is simple, inexpensive and labor saving compared to ex vivo dendritic cell vaccines. The aim of this project is to formulate a delivery system that will be a structurally modified PLGA nanoparticle based cancer vaccine coated with anti-CD205 antibody to selectively recognize dendritic cell receptors for delivering antigens to those cells. This active immunotherapy will be achieved by manipulating the immune response to boost cancer patients’ immune system, which will then become capable to recognize and eradicate cancer antigens in the body.

In women, breast cancer is rated as the second leading cause of cancer death among all cancerous diseases. 22.9 % of all invasive cancers in woman are involved with breast cancer. Human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER2) gene amplification takes place in around 30% of breast cancers. Over expression of human HER2 gene is evolved as a key biomarker used for the pathogenesis of breast cancer and this creates a scope to design anticancer based targeted drug delivery system. The conventional cancer therapies are limited by some drawbacks like low therapeutic index, nonspecific targeting, drug inaccessibility to tumor cells, poor half-life, multiple drug resistance development, high dose requirement, and painful cytotoxicity effects. These confines can be overcome by biocompatible and biodegradable properties of polymeric nanoparticle mediated actively targeted drug delivery system to develop targeted chemotherapy.