Meet Horacio Cabral — Developing lifesaving nanomedicine

My name is Horacio Cabral. I’m an associate professor at the department of Bio-engineering at the University of Tokyo I’m from Argentina and I’ve been working here for more than 15 years I’ve been working in the field of nano-medicine which is the study of nano-scale materials We aim to develop new types of nano-medicines for the treatment of intractable diseases To prepare our nano medicines we develop new types of polymer and these polymers are synthesized in a very controlled manner… …so that we can get high quality materials that will be used to self-assemble Once we construct our nano medicines and we characterize them, we study the stability of the nano-medicines in different conditions We also study the activity of the nano-medicines for example to kill cancer cells or to reduce specific proteins in the disease cells One unique characteristic of our nano-medicine is that we can control the size. This size control is quite advantageous for treating pancreatic cancer… …because pancreatic cancer has a very dense collagen network which prevents the penetration of drugs We can develop nano-medicines that are small enough to penetrate into the pancreatic tumor and achieve very effective treatment [of] the disease Some of these formulations have actually translated into human clinical trials and are being studied in Japan and also overseas Currently there are 15 students in my lab, half of them are foreigners, half of them are from Japan They belong to different research areas including materials engineering, chemical engineering, pharmacy, medical school So each one provides a unique viewpoint to the nano medicine problem For many years we have focused on developing nano-medicines for cancer treatment And now we are starting to explore treatment of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease or diabetes, which are a major struggle for many patients around the world So by designing new type of treatments we will benefit humanity in the near future .