Engineering a Better Cancer Fighter

February 28 2007
Mark E. Davis, PhD

Dr. Davis will discuss his work on therapeutic molecules and drug delivery systems that have the potential to provide much improved treatments for a variety of devastating diseases, particularly cancer.

The engineering behind the enhanced ability to fight cancer is a nano-engineered class of linear cyclodextrin-containing polymers, designed to enable the manipulation of particle size and other characteristics to improve drug properties and performance.

Mark E. Davis
Warren and Katharine Schlinger Professor of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology
Member, Experimental Therapeutics Program of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the City of Hope

Mark Davis has over 325 scientific publications, two textbooks, and over 40 patents.  Professor Davis is a founding editor of CaTTech and has been an associate editor of Chemistry of Materials and the AIChE Journal.  He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Colburn and Professional Progress Awards from the AIChE and the Ipatieff, Langmuir and Murphree Prizes from the ACS.  Professor Davis was the first engineer to win the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award.  He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2006.

Dr. Davis is the founder of Insert Therapeutics Inc., a company based in Pasadena, focused on the use of cyclodextrin-containing polymers for drug delivery applications, and Calando Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a company based in Duarte, CA, that creates RNAi therapeutics.  He is currently or has been a member of the scientific advisory boards of Symyx (Nasdaq: SMMX), Alnylam (Nasdaq: ALNY) and NovoDynamics.