J. Andrew MacKay, the Gavin Herbert Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the USC Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, has been named a senior member by National Academy of Inventors (NAI).
His lab is focused on engineering protein-polymer tools that hold the potential to transform the development of precision, multifunctional drug carriers.
“Drug delivery in the eye and cancer is often limited by access to and retention at the target site,” explains MacKay, who has six issued U.S. patents, with four focusing on ocular applications of his technology. “Our strategy is to repackage drugs and functional peptides into protein-polymers that control release and reduce toxicity.”
“Our group has recently made significant breakthroughs by assembling polypeptide ‘microdomains’ on the surface of and inside living cells,” adds MacKay, who holds secondary appointments in biomedical engineering and ophthalmology and serves as executive editor for the journal Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews. He also serves as a panel reviewer for the U.S. National Institutes of Health, primarily as a member of a nanomedicine-focused study section. “When decorated with functional proteins, these polypeptides are helping us to precisely modulate cellular biology and design new therapies.”
MacKay’s mentors at USC include Sarah Hamm-Alvarez, professor of ophthalmology and pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences, with whom he has collaborated continuously since joining the USC faculty in 2008. This mentorship was essential to identify novel applications for this technology, especially in the areas of ocular drug delivery. MacKay and Hamm-Alvarez were recently awarded renewal of a five-year, $2.9 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for their project, “Protein-Polymer Nanomedicine for Sjogren’s Syndrome.”
MacKay and 10 other researchers at USC were named senior members of NAI. Read more on USC Today.