Research Projects

Self-Drug-Delivery (SDD) system is a relatively recent concept wherein one can get rid of the vehicle that is required in developing Conventional-Drug-Delivery (CDD). This is particularly important because of the following challenges encountered in designing vehicle required in developing CDD systems: 1) environment friendly synthesis, 2) cytotoxicity, 3) biostability and biodegradability of the vehicle and 4) optimizing drug loading and release kinetics etc. from the vehicle. In SDD system, on the hand, one need not worry about such challenges concerning the vehicle. Herein, the drug itself is delivered to the target site (hence, the name SDD). There are many ways to achieve this goal. One such approach is to convert the drug to a supramolecular gel so that it can be applied either topically (noninvasive) or subcutaneously (invasive). Although there have been significant efforts from various groups including PI’s group to develop SDD systems from organic materials, drug delivery systems based on metal-organic counterpart have been mainly confined to MOF loaded drug and therefore, belong to CDD systems. In here, it is proposed to develop SDD system from coordination polymers (CPs)/coordination complexes (CCs) containing drug or prodrug as part of the CPs/CCs. For this purpose, the design principle developed by PI’s group for synthesizing metallogelators will be employed (for details, see Section 2.3). The resulting metallogels will be subjected to various characterizations and their suitability as potential SDD system will be evaluated. The lead materials, thus developed, will then be further explored towards developing SDD system.