I want to deliver medicines effectively to the right place in the body

The core aim of my research is to improve how drugs are delivered into the body, to improve their performance. 

Our bodies can provide lots of obstacles to drugs being absorbed or reaching the site of an illness. This might be the saliva in the mouth, the acid in the stomach, or the cells that form the lining of the intestine or airways for instance.

We can help to overcome those obstacles by looking at how drugs are made, formulated or packaged, and how they are given to a patient - as a tablet or an injection or through an IV line.

The idea behind my research is to design a drug’s formulation, ‘packaging’ such as encapsulating the drug, and delivery, to ensure that the medicine gets to where it needs to go in the body.

It's perhaps a less glamorous element of drug discovery and development, but it is crucial. Research could identify potentially the best drug in the world, but if that molecule can’t get to where it needs to go, it won’t work.

My background spans both industry and academia. After my chemical engineering degree and Master’s degree in industrial engineering, I spent many years working in pharmaceutical companies such as Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine and MSD Ireland, in start-up and operational roles, which gives me a deep perspective on the challenges and opportunities in a commercial regulated environment.

Before moving to DCU, I did my PhD and post-doctoral work in the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, where I researched advanced technologies to enhance  drug delivery to the intestine and into the lungs. The goal is that the patient can receive an effective dose of the drug and in a less invasive manner than a needle and this is an area where I continue to work.

Take idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, or IPF, as an example. This devastating lung disease has a poor prognosis, and the few drugs that are available to treat it have limitations. There is a clear unmet need for new, more effective therapies, and I’m looking at ways to optimise the delivery of small-molecule drugs directly to the lungs so they can work where they are needed and cause fewer systemic side effects

My research also looks at how to deliver larger, more complex molecules into the body effectively, such as biologics. These kinds of medicines have been game-changers to treat conditions like arthritis, cancer, diabetes and obesity. By exploring how we can make these biopharmaceuticals more available to the body, the hope is that they can be used more efficiently and they are easier for the patient to take. 

I’m excited to be in DCU, and to be in the Life Sciences Institute, where I can work with researchers from different backgrounds. As an example, already I am starting to collaborate with colleagues who are engineering microbes to produce novel molecules that can be used to aid drug delivery.

I hope that my expertise and experience in the biopharmaceutical industry around drug formulation and the regulatory landscape for medicines can now help my colleagues and collaborators in DCU, so that discoveries can be moved towards commercialisation and the clinic.