Biography
Dr Pegah Varamini is a lecturer and group leader in Cancer Theme within the Faculty of Pharmacy. She is the leader of Cancer Targeting-Drug Delivery Group. Dr Varamini was awarded the prestigious National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) fellowship in Jan 2016. She completed her PhD degree in Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacology in December 2012 (UQ, Australia). She also has a professional Doctorate degree in Pharmacy (PharmD). She won Dean’s Award for Research Higher Degree Excellence in 2013. Dr Varamini’s work was selected by the Australian Academy of Science in August 2016, resulting in her personal presentation at the inaugural Falling Walls Lab in Canberra (a gathering of 25 selected Australian and New Zealand researchers, entrepreneurs, engineers and innovators). She has been the Collaboration Award Finalist at Sydney University in 2017.
Research Interest
Dr Varamini’s research interests and expertise are in different areas of pharmaceutical sciences including Cancer Targeting, Drug Design and Drug Delivery, Nano-Medicine/Nano-Formulation, Vaccine Delivery, and Natural Product Chemistry. Her major research focuses are: 1) targeted delivery of highly potent antineoplastic agents to breast cancer cells for the treatment of Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) and advanced Metastatic Breast Cancer (MBC) via some overexpressed receptors (“Trojan Horse†approach); 2) development of advanced formulations for prevention and targeted therapy of breast cancer bone metastasis.
Biography
Octavian Bucur, MD, PhD is Instructor in the Department of Pathology at the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, MA, focusing on the development and application of new experimental and computational technologies with significant impact in molecular, diagnostic pathology and personalized medicine. He is also a member of the Ludwig Cancer Center at Harvard and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In collaboration with Dr. Edward Boyden’s laboratory at MIT, he has developed a pathology-optimized physical tissue expansion method called Expansion Pathology, that enables~100 times expansion in volume of any type of clinical specimen and visualization of 70-80nm structures with conventional optical microscopes (currently limited to ~250nm resolution). Expansion Pathology has the potential of replacing electron microscopy in diagnosis and investigation of certain pathologies and nanometer structures (Nature Biotechnology, August 2017, 3 patents filed).
Research Interest
He has developed a pathology-optimized physical tissue expansion method called Expansion Pathology, that enables~100 times expansion in volume of any type of clinical specimen and visualization of 70-80nm structures with conventional optical microscopes (currently limited to ~250nm resolution). Expansion Pathology has the potential of replacing electron microscopy in diagnosis and investigation of certain pathologies and nanometer structures (Nature Biotechnology, August 2017, 3 patents filed).
Biography
Andrei L. Gartel, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is the academic editor of PLOS ONE. He is the author of 89 peer-review publications that include more than 20 reviews. He has more than 10,000 citations and his h-index is 40. His scientific interests include cancer, cell cycle, protein-protein interactions, regulation of CDK inhibitor p21 and regulation of oncogenic transcription factors FOXM1, and c- Myc. Specifically, his lab is interested in identification of new FOXM1 inhibitors. He received his funding from NIH, DOD and private companies/foundations.
Research Interest
His scientific interests include cancer, cell cycle, protein-protein interactions, regulation of CDK inhibitor p21 and regulation of oncogenic transcription factors FOXM1, and c- Myc. Specifically, his lab is interested in identification of new FOXM1 inhibitors. He received his funding from NIH, DOD and private companies/foundations.
