UNC Lineberger member Zhen Gu has been awarded a 2016 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a two-year grant given to early-career scientists and scholars whose distinguished performance and unique potential identify them as rising stars, the next generation of scientific leaders.
Zhen Gu has been awarded a 2016 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a two-year grant given to early-career scientists and scholars whose distinguished performance and unique potential identify them as rising stars, the next generation of scientific leaders.
Zhen Gu, an assistant professor in the joint biomedical engineering program at Carolina and North Carolina State University, joined NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill in 2012, and has since created dozens of technologies and techniques aimed at precisely delivering the right drug to the right place at the right time to maximize the impact of therapeutic medications. Gu’s work is truly interdisciplinary, drawing on biomolecular engineering, materials chemistry, nanotechnology and other fields to develop more effective drug delivery tools and techniques.
Gu’s work on diabetes includes the development of a “smart insulin patch” that mimics the function of pancreatic cells and multiple injectable nanoscale systems that can help to regulate insulin. Gu is currently working with pharmaceutical companies to move these inventions into clinical trials. In 2015, Gu was named one of MIT Technology Review’s “Innovators Under 35” for his work on developing novel drug-delivery systems for treating cancer and diabetes.
He has also created a suite of “programmed” approaches for targeting the delivery of anti-cancer drugs, the release of which can be promoted inside the tumor microenvironment or cancer cells.