Carriers are needed for a number of reasons in drug delivery, e.g. to protect the drug from the body, to protect the body from the drug and to adjust the pharmacokinetics, i.e. distribution and clearance, of the drug.

In addition it is also necessary to use approved components, to make the preparation process simple and scalable, to make a reproducible product with easy to control properties and to make the product economically.

Professor Vladimir Torchilin will present his vision of how nanotechnology is being applied to make novel multifunctional pharmaceutical nanocarriers meet some of these major challenges of delivering modern advanced pharmaceuticals safely and efficiently in a keynote presentation at Nanomedicine 2010: Visions for the Future. Further information and registration can be found via the link below.

Vladimir P. Torchilin, PhD, DSc is Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Director, Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and Nanomedicine, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Moscow University and also obtained his PhD and DSc there in polymer chemistry, chemical kinetics and catalysis, and chemistry of physiologically active compounds. In 1991 he joined Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School as the Head of the Chemistry Program and Associate Professor of Radiology. Since 1998 Dr. Torchilin has been with Northeastern University where he was Chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences from1998-2008. His research interests have focused on biomedical polymers, polymeric drugs, immobilized medicinal enzymes, drug delivery and targeting, pharmaceutical nanocarriers for diagnostic and therapeutic agents, and experimental cancer immunology. He has published more than 300 original papers, more than 100 reviews and book chapters, has written and edited 10 books, and holds more that 40 patents.