Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 4 No. 1 Spring 2019 | Page 20

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Rick Davis (left), professor of chemical engineering; Bahareh Behkam (middle), associate professor of mechanical engineering; and Coy Allen (right), assistant professor of biomedical
sciences and pathobiology in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. All three are affiliated with Virginia Tech's Macromolecules Innovation Institute and have teamed up on
developing their new drug delivery system called NanoBEADS.
ANDREW
TIE
MACROMOLECULES
INNOVATION
INSTITUTE
Interdisciplinary team creates
drug delivery system
An interdisciplinary team of three Virginia
Tech faculty members affiliated with the Mac-
romolecules Innovation Institute has created
a drug delivery system that could radically
expand cancer treatment options.
The conventional cancer treatment meth-
od of injecting nanoparticle drugs into the
bloodstream results in low efficacy. Due to the
complexities of the human body, very few of
those nanoparticles actually reach the cancer
site, and once there, there’s limited delivery
across the cancer tissue.
The new system created at Virginia Tech is
known as Nanoscale Bacteria-Enabled Auton-
omous Drug Delivery System (NanoBEADS).
Researchers have developed a process to
chemically attach nanoparticles of anti-cancer
drugs onto attenuated bacteria cells, which