Ravikumar Majeti
University of Alabama, AL·Pharmacology
Most drugs would be far easier to take as a pill than as an injection, but the gut is a formidable barrier: it is built to absorb nutrients and keep everything else out. Tiny carriers made of degradable polymers, called polymer nanoparticles, can ferry drugs across that barrier, yet their design is still largely trial and error, and there is no reliable way to predict how a given particle will behave in a person.
- Fields
Pharmacology
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
polymer nanoparticles
oral drug delivery
polyesters
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Synthesize polyesters with controlled topologies and use them to probe transcytosis, the ferrying of particles through cells, at the gut-blood barrier across in vitro, in vivo, and in silico experiments in preclinical species.
- Build a bottom-up systems physiologically based pharmacokinetic model that integrates all preclinical absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination data to predict clinical behavior of orally dosed drug-laden nanoparticles.
- Determine how the structure of the nanoparticle delivery system and the underlying disease state influence the oral bioavailability of urolithin A, a gut microbial metabolite of ellagic acid.
- Test whether the most bioavailable nanoparticle form of urolithin A protects against cisplatin-induced acute kidney injury across doses and ages in mice, and whether it helps or hinders cisplatin's effects in a cancer setting.
- Establish efficacy of nanoparticle urolithin A against cisplatin-induced kidney injury in healthy dogs, a species closer to humans in gut physiology, with animals re-homed as pets at study end.
- Define structure-activity relationships for cyclosporine-loaded periodic-functional-polyester nanoparticles targeted to CD71 (transferrin receptor 1) by varying ligand density and spacer size, using a murine lupus model and transferrin receptor knockout mice.
- Determine the therapeutic dose and resulting survival benefit of the most effective lymphoid-targeting cyclosporine nanoparticle in mouse models of systemic lupus erythematosus.
More about the research
Work here spans three linked threads: building polymer carriers whose chemical architecture can be tuned on purpose, using them to deliver specific drugs in kidney injury and in lupus, and building mathematical models that connect animal data to expected human behavior.
Why it matters
Acute kidney injury affects roughly 13 million people a year and lupus about 5 million worldwide, and neither has adequate drug options; cyclosporine and urolithin A both show promise but fail on delivery. Making these drugs reliably absorbable and steering them to the right tissue could yield oral treatments with fewer side effects, and the predictive pharmacokinetic models could shorten the path from animal studies to human trials for oral nanoparticle medicines generally.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Na Li
University of Connecticut, CT·Pharmacology
Measure the particle drifting effect, where tiny drug particles aid absorption, in vitro and in vivo, and build mass transport and PBPK models to predict drug absorption from amorphous solid dispersions.
Shijie Cao
University of Washington, WA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Engineer synthetic microbiome mimics: polymer nanoparticles that release bacterial metabolites and are coated with outer membrane vesicles from chosen bacterial strains, with core and shell varied independently to separate structural from metabolic signals.
Sung Lim
Emory University, GA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether social determinants of health, such as economic and neighborhood conditions, predict work loss, end-stage kidney disease and mortality among people with systemic lupus erythematosus in the Atlanta-area GOAL cohort.
The school
University of Alabama: 22 labs on PI Pages, $221M a year on research, 235 research doctorates a year.
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