Sandro R. P. da Rocha
Professor
Virginia Commonwealth University
United States
Biography
Sandro R. P. da Rocha, Professor in Pharmaceutics and Director for Pharmaceutical Engineering – School of Pharmacy, Chemical & Life Science Engineering and Massey Cancer Center My expertise is in the broad area of Nanomedicine. My long-term goal is to develop innovative drug and gene nanocarriers and engineer formulations for their pulmonary administration, for the treatment of local lung diseases and systemic disorders. We seek to achieve our objectives by engineering carriers with controlled morphology, size, and surface chemistry. Nanocarriers are of great relevance as they provide opportunities to mediate the interaction between the therapeutic molecules and the physiological environment so as to achieve not only spatially and temporally resolved release of drugs, but also to target the payload to specific tissues/cell populations/ intracellular organelles, while at the same time protecting the cargo from degradation. We study the interaction of nanocarriers at various biological interfaces, with particular focus to the lungs, including tissue, cell and organelle level, both in vitro and in vivo. My group uses a combined experimental and computational strategy to probe these interfaces.
Research Interest
Pharmaceutics and Chemical & Life Science Engineering