Vivek Gupta
St. John’s University, USA
Title: Nano-Repurposing Strategies for Enhanced Efficacy against New Indications
Biography
Biography: Vivek Gupta
Abstract
Drug repurposing may be defined as developing old drugs for new indications. These old drugs may include already commercialized products, and drugs in clinical development. Drug repurposing approach is very cost-effective in putting new drugs in market, especially for rare diseases. While promising, drug repurposing has several limitations while being developed for new indications, including different dose requirements, acute vs chronic treatment needs, limited safety by new administration route, and patentability pertaining to possible commercialization. Encapsulating repurposed drugs in site-specific nanocarriers may provide an alternative to overcome these limitations. Nano-encapsulation i.e., nano-repurposing will be able to avoid off-target localization, reduce dose exposure to the body; and will also provide a patentable IP based on novel delivery methods. Our research group at St. John’s University works in the domain of nano-repurposing for developing novel therapeutics for respiratory disorders, in a cost-effective fashion, that will also be scalable for commercial production. We aim to develop non-invasive ways of delivering therapeutics to the lungs by inhalation. In this presentation, I will present some of the recent works from our group, detailing about repurposing currently FDA-approved drugs for newer indications including lung cancer, mesothelioma, and breast cancer. I will also show some data about scale-up potential of formulation development approaches, employed by our group.