Alumnae Rasika Vartak wrote an article titled “New Way To Deliver Drugs” for Young Zine magazine. She obtained her Ph.D in Cellular and Structural Biology and recently completed a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. She will soon be starting another postdoc at Arizona State University. 

Here is a short snippet from her article.

The Problem With Cancer Drugs 

Medicines, when directly ingested or injected in the body, can cause two problems. First, the medicine is quickly degraded by the body and hence is needed in very high doses to be effective. Secondly, the medicine could cause severe side effects when given all at once. Both these problems resulted in the medicine being administered frequently to the patient.

The solution was to control the rate at which the medicine can be slowly released into the body so it would remain effective for a long time with minimum side effects.

To read the full article, click here.