Engineering programmable cancer nanomedicines responsive to the metabolic state of the tumour microenvironment

Novel drug formulations aim to control the location and timing of drug release for optimal therapeutic benefit. This project will engineer cancer nanomedicines that control drug release in response to metabolites in the local tissue microenvironment. Vesicles will be assembled encapsulating anticancer drugs with appropriate enzymes that process metabolites into signals that regulate drug release. Design rules for these formulations will be systematically investigated using design, test, learn cycles. In parallel, genome-scale bioinformatics modelling will predict metabolite profiles for a range of tumour microenvironments for different cancer types. This will aid in identification of optimal cancers to target with these nanomedicines and pinpoint new metabolites that would be beneficial to develop response mechanisms for. This project provides training in a combination of wet-lab formulation and engineering biology techniques, and computational bioinformatics methods, giving a broad foundation for a career at the interface of engineering and the life sciences.