Prof. Thayumanavan Awarded a $1.57 Million DARPA Grant

The University of Massachusetts Amherst has been awarded a $1.57 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the design of a drug delivery system that will control the release of medications in the body, according to Chemistry Department professor S. “Thai” Thayumanavan, the principal investigator of the research group that received the award.
DARPA is the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD).

DARPA manages and directs selected basic and applied research and development projects for DoD, and pursues research and technology where risk and payoff are both very high. “The objective of our project is to design a drug carrier that has feedback control,” explained Prof. Thayumanavan. “The drug carrier will be used to control the release of a drug in the body.”  As an example, Thayumanavan said that the drug carrier will facilitate the regulated release of pain-relieving medications.  “When the pain killer nears a toxic level in the body, a marker is released.  The drug carrier will respond to this released marker by shutting down the release of the pain killer, thereby regulating the medication back to a therapeutic level,” he said. “Our research group is designing such a delivery system.”

The DARPA grant is a one-year grant with an additional option year. Thayumanavan’s research group at UMass Amherst is the lead group on the project, with collaborators at Stanford University’s School of Medicine and at Oregon Health and Science University.

(May 2007)