SEMINAR: Novel therapy by selective degradation of abnormal extracellular matrix

Dr. Juliana Hamzah is a NHMRC-National Heart Foundation R.D. Wright research fellow with expertise on targeted delivery for imaging and therapy. Previously she was an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Nanomedicine, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, California (2009-2012). Juliana relocated to Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research in 2013 and established her laboratory, Targeted Drug Delivery, Imaging and Therapy. Her research focuses on developing strategies, incorporating bioengineering and nanotechnology platforms, to specifically target pathological lesions including solid tumours and atherosclerotic lesions for local therapeutic intervention and in vivo imaging. Her work was published in journals including Nature, JCI and PNAS. In this seminar she will present the latest technology and novel drug developed in her laboratory to break tumour stiffness. She will discuss the significance of this approach to detect and treat cancers that are resistant to chemotherapies, including triple negative breast cancer and liver cancer.