Saturday, October 22, 2016

PROFILES IN RESEARCH EXCELLENCE: Dr. Varatharasa Thiviyanathan

Linda and me, in Egypt
After chemo her hair grew back gray.  I really liked it.

Let’s get the name business over first.  Hereafter, in this essay, he will be known as Dr. T.  Some research this afternoon suggests that the name is Sri Lankan.  He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University and now works at the University of Texas Medical Center in Houston, where he has been since 1994.  He is a co-author of countless medical research papers (well, 27 since 2000).  More about his history I cannot determine.

As an aside, typing Dr. T’s full name into various search engines is laborious.  I can imagine the poor kid in grammar school, taking exams.  The other kids would be turning in their papers about the time he finished writing his name at the top of the answer sheet!

But who cares how tough his name is to spell; he is doing some great work.  Partially funded by the Rivkin Center, Dr. T is developing a novel sort of address label to deliver nanoparticles of death-dealing drugs directly to cancer cells.  His labels consist of short strands of RNA, especially constructed to zoom in on specific types of cancer cells and, binding to them, deliver their lethal load.


This line of research seems potentially fruitful to me; I have written about nanoparticles before.
However, always remember my abysmal ignorance of most things biological.  If you are curious, Google “aptamer” and go from there.  Me, I’m still tired from my recent trip.

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