Adventures in Photomedicine:

Using Light-Mediated Processes to Improve Health and Treat Disease

Photomedicine is an interdisciplinary field where chemistry and light meet to fight disease. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a special branch of photomedicine that employs a sensitizer molecule, light, and oxygen to destroy target cells with spatiotemporal selectivity. Despite its enormous potential for treating certain diseases, including cancer and infection, PDT has yet to become mainstream. Over the past 10 years, my group has addressed key issues that have hampered bench-to-bedside progress in the field of PDT. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we have introduced both synthetic compounds and natural products (both currently being investigated in human clinical trials) as alternatives to existing porphyrin-based PDT agents for specific indications. This seminar will share some of our past experiences in developing metallodrug photosensitizers for treating bladder cancer (and photoactive plant extracts for improving oral health if time permits), and will highlight new directions toward the design of immunomodulating theranostic photosensitizers for melanoma PDT.

A recent article in Nature asked, “Is science only for the rich?” In the United States, writer Jane J. Lee concluded, there are steep challenges for students from lower-income backgrounds who want to pursue science, but there are also positive examples of people who are working to create opportunities for these students—people like Michael Summers.

Summers is Robert E. Meyerhoff Chair for Excellence in Research and Mentoring and University Distinguished Professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UMBC. His lab is nationally and internationally known for engaging students from all backgrounds in high-level, hands-on research from day one, and further supporting them through intensive faculty and peer mentorship.

 Chris Geddes, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and director of the Institute of Fluorescence, won a phase III award in this round for Lyse-it, a company that produces a low-cost portable device that breaks open cells and chops up their DNA to prescribed fragment sizes, a step required in many sample-preparation procedures in the biomedical research and health care industries. The phase III funding will facilitate production of a large inventory of the Lyse-it product and support development of a rapid marketing strategy.

The Scientific Review Committee of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) foundation approved funding for the project, entitled “Cancer-specific Metabolic Complex for Small Molecule Drug Discovery.” Dr. An formally accepted the grant at the 2016 AACR Annual Meeting in New Orleans, and he posed with Dr. Jose Baselga, Immediate Past President of the AACR (right), and Dr. Karl Ziegelbauer, Senior Vice President and Head, Therapeutic Research Groups of Bayer (left). Dr. An and his team anticipate to generate a novel class of drugs that influence the metabolic flux of glucose metabolism through its spatial assembly, without inhibiting the canonical activities of individual enzymes, for therapeutic intervention.