NanoTumor Center Family

A Message from the Director

Welcome to the NTC Family. We invite you to get to know us and learn about the many ways we are fighting cancer for people. Our center is composed of participants from the University of California at San Diego, Santa Barbara, Irvine and Riverside campuses together with the Burnham Institute and NanoBioNexus. A very special element of our center in Southern California is that, not only do we break the boundaries across the departments but we also break boundaries across campuses. We all work together. As the name of our center indicates, our main objective at the center is to apply nanotechnology to the treatment, understanding, and monitoring of cancer towards reducing the suffering and death it results in. To realize this objective, we use targeted nanoparticles of various sizes and properties, optimized for detection, sensing, imaging, and therapy.

Experiments that we have performed in our laboratories and also at other institutions already prove the feasibility of performing some of these functions with nanoparticles. Our focus at the center will be on making these nanoparticles stealth in the vascular system, specific as they attach only to the tumor, and capable of penetrating into it without polluting other organs. We will carry on longitudinal measurements in time on cancerous cells in order to improve our understanding of the evolution of the disease, with transition to platforms rapidly to the industry, and of course the CCNEs as they become available.

Our longer-term vision is to ultimately deliver these nanoplatforms as a payload of multifunctional "smart motherships," capable of detection, identification, imaging and performing measurements, and providing treatment, as well as delivering therapies to residual cancer cells as they circulate in the system. These "smart motherships" will be somewhat larger in size than a micron, a few microns perhaps, but they will have nanoparticles as their payloads. To this end we have assembled a multidisciplinary team that not only includes distinguished physicians, scientists, mathematicians and engineers, but also seasoned entrepreneurs, and established collaboration with the industry to incrementally move our discoveries to the marketplace to advance cancer diagnosis, prevention and treatment.

Sincerely, Sadik Esener, Ph.D. Principal Investigator and Center Director Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego