Brilliant Distinguished Faculty Lecture on Smart Therapy: The Search for Better Targeted Delivery Systems in Disease Treatment

Imagine if one could construct drug delivery systems that would, for example, in the case of cancer, target tumors precisely - traveling through the bloodstream and releasing life-saving drugs precisely where they were needed. Thus, healthy cells would not be negatively affected as in today's chemotherapy but only cancerous tumors.

Today, I had the pleasure, after a busy day of teaching, holding office hours, and even reviewing a paper, to listen to Dr. S. “Thai” Thayumanavan, Professor of Chemistry, deliver a Distinguished Faculty Lecture. Professor Thai is a neighbor of mine and not only was I fascinated by the topic of his talk but I also wanted to support him.

This is the 40th year that UMass Amherst has been hosting the Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series at which UMass faculty are recognized for exceptional scholarship and, after their lectures,  are awarded the Chancellor's Medal.

Our new Provost, Dr. Katherine Newman introduced Professor Thai since our Chancellor was at the cybersecurity event in Boston.

I had the honor of being a Distinguished Faculty Lecturer in 2000 and the topic of my presentation was "Networks for Fun and Profit."  I had some competition that day because the Nobel laureate in literature Seamus Heaney was speaking at the same time. 

After the lecture there is a reception and then a dinner in honor of the recipient for family member and invited guests with also some top administrators resent.

The Bernie Dallas Room of the Goodell building was packed for Professor Thai's lecture, which was very clear and captivating. He began with images of his sons, his students, and colleagues and talked about what does it mean for a material to be "smart." He emphasized the importance of  "sense and respond" in various systems especially in nature. He noted that these concepts are also important in business models and in neural networks (I was very happy to see an image of networks in his presentation) and spoke about the macro to the molecular level emphasizing the different time scales involved and how imperative it is to bridge them.

Professor Thai has graduated 25 PhD students and is presently supervising 25 doctoral students. He holds 12 patents and is the recipient of many major awards. He is an organic chemist and noted that he himself has never built a polymer but his students certainly have!

He also noted the relevance of connecting inputs to outputs and structure to function.

His visualizations and animations of polymers being constructed and drugs being enveloped in nanogels for smart delivery were beautifully done. His approach is not to attach a drug to an antibody because it then has to be released but, rather, to encase it in an antibody.

He posted the constraints that researchers are up against to develop an ideal drug delivery system, which includes that it should be non-toxic; easy to make, and doesn't dissolve prematurely. The drugs must be able t differentiate tumors from healthy cells.

He also spoke about the frontiers of drug delivery systems over the next ten years and, interestingly, he said that big pharma is not pursuing these questions - sensing and exploiting imbalances in proteins.

Lucky are we in academia, who are "always in school," and can learn from such colleagues and Professor Thai, a true trailblazer in scientific research.

In the above photo, our Provost is presenting the Chancellor's medal.

The Most Multidisciplinary Supply Chain -- The Medical Nuclear Supply Chain -- Where Operations Research, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology All Meet

Supply chains underpin our economy and are part of each and every industry.

To model and solve supply chain problems, one often has to take a multidisciplinary approach.

Never more so than in the case of medical nuclear supply chains, a topic that we have been researching for several years now and have even written an OpEd piece . These supply chains are especially vulnerable due to the aging of the nuclear reactors where the isotopes are irradiated. Each day, 41,000 nuclear medical procedures are performed in the U.S. using Technetium-99m, a radioisotope obtained from the decay of Molybdenum-99. The Molybdenum is produced by irradiating Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) targets in research reactors. The radioisotopes are used in medical imaging and diagnostics ranging from cardiac problems to cancer.

When I was an undergraduate at Brown University, and then a graduate student there, I remember being told that one might make use of subject matter in the future that one was studying even though it might not be apparent or even envisionable at that point.

I especially enjoy working on systems, notably, network systems, and, hence, my love of supply chains.

I would argue that medical nuclear supply chains are the most multidisciplinary supply chains and to capture their functionality (and, of course, vulnerability) and, hence, to improve their operation as well as their design, one has to be knowledgable about physics, chemistry, biology/medicine, and, of course, operations research. This may entail collaborations across disciplines but that is an approach that pushes knowledge forward.

Above we have composed a graphic that highlights some of the salient issues surrounding medical nuclear supply chains. Our most recent paper on the topic is: Securing the Sustainability of Global Medical Nuclear Supply Chains Through Economic Cost Recovery, Risk Management, and Optimization, Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Dong Li, to appear in the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation. An earlier paper of ours: Medical Nuclear Supply Chain Design: A Tractable Network Model and Computational Approach, Anna Nagurney and Ladimer S. Nagurney, was published in the International Journal of Production Economics 140(2): (2012) pp 865-874.

A lecture given on the topic to biomedical engineers, which has additional background material, can be accessed here.  Another nice lecture on prezi, which cites our work, and has stunning graphics, can be viewed here.

Hence, do listen to your professors -- chemistry, physics, biology, and math, and operations research you may one day be using and applying and even integrating!

A Tribute to the Nobel Laureate William N. Lipscomb

Professor William "Bill" Lipscomb, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and long-time Harvard professor, passed away on April 14, 2011, at age 91.

I had heard a lot about Professor Lipscomb since my husband had been in the same class at Lafayette College as his son, James, and he had met him several times. Later, I even met Professor Lipscomb at a chamber music event at Brown University organized by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) (all performers had to be members of the AMS so since his particular instrument, the clarinet, was needed, he was quickly made an honorary member).

It was clear that not only did Professor Lipscomb love music and performing, and wearing a string tie, even to the Nobel ceremony, but he also loved science and he was so successful at it. The Nobel laureate, Dr. Linus Pauling, was his mentor and Lipscomb switched from physics (my husband's major) to chemistry under his influence.

Not only did Dr. Lipscomb receive a Nobel prize, but two of his graduate students did, as well, plus another student who had spent time in his lab! And it all started with a chemistry set that he received at age 11.

His sense of humor was legendary, and he was an avid participant in the annual Ig Nobel prize ceremonies at Harvard (which I have blogged about).

The Boston Globe, in a touching obituary, has the following quote from Professor Lipscomb, which is so true:

“A scientist proceeds in making discoveries in very much the same way that an artist goes about working,’’ Dr. Lipscomb said in a 1981 US News & World Report interview.

“You have to master a large discipline, and your discoveries are not necessarily made by planning them. They arise intuitively. You suddenly perceive brand-new connections that you were unaware of before. Material somehow reorganizes itself in your mind, and that leads to the spawning of a new group of ideas.’’

According to his son, James, Lipscomb was humble and exhibited his characteristic self-deprecating humor even after being awarded the Nobel.

"He said something like 'I knew that I'd written a lot of good papers, but I didn't know that anyone had read them,'" James said.