Collaborators
Chalet Tan, PhD is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Drug Delivery at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Pharmacy. Her research interests mainly focus on the design, pharmacokinetics and efficacy evaluation of nano delivery of small-molecule anticancer drugs as well as miRNA mimics. Moreover, she has extensive experience in hypoxia induced resistance to chemotherapy. She was trained as a pharmaceutical scientist with emphasis on pharmacokinetics and cancer biology.
Donald W. Coulter, MD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, UNMC. He is a clinician and pediatric oncologist in children hospital and Nebraska Medical Center. He is the principal investigator for the state-funded Children’s Oncology Group grant at The University of Nebraska Medical Center and serving as the director for Pediatric Cancer Research Group since 2014.
Kishor K. Bhakat, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Anatomy at UNMC. He has more than 23 years of research experience in studying the DNA damage repair, posttranslational modifications of DNA repair proteins and chemoresistance in cancer.
Pankaj K. Singh, PhD is Professor and Chair, Department of Oncological Science at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center. He is also serving as the coordinator of the Cancer Metabolomics Program at the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center. He has extensive experience in characterizing metabolic genes, and therapeutic targets for effective clinical treatment of metastatic pancreatic tumors. He has expertise in studying metabolic alterations in hypoxia that regulate therapy responsiveness.
Vijay Bhatt, MD is an Associate Professor of Hematology-Oncology at the Buffett Cancer Center, UNMC. Dr. Bhatt is board certified in medical oncology and has extensive experience in designing interdisciplinary clinical and translational studies.
Natalia Osna, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Veteran Affairs Medical Center, Omaha, NE. She has the expertise in studying the role of inflammation, innate immunity, apoptosis, proteasome dysfunctions, and extracellular vesicles in the mechanisms of liver disease development, alcohol-induced liver injury, HIV-co-infections; second hits (co-infections, alcohol) mouse model generation.
Yuxiang Dong, PhD is a Research Associate Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, at NMC. Dr. Dong is a medicinal chemist and synthesizes the novel Hh pathway inhibitor. He also designed SF2523 analogs and liver targeted polymer.
Donald Ronning, PhD is a Professor of Biochemistry in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at UNMC. Dr. Ronning is a biochemist and structural biologist. His efforts are in obtaining structural data of BD-inhibitor complexes and interpretation of the structural models obtained from these complexes.
Andy Zhong, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, which is only five-minute drive from your department at the UNMC. In the past several years, he has been studying the structure-based design and synthesis of EGFR and PI3K inhibitors as potential anti-cancer drugs using molecular dynamics simulations, docking and binding free energy estimation.
Wei Li, PhD We are working with Dr. Wei Li to design/synthesize novel polymeric nanoparticles to treat melanoma. Melanoma is an extremely aggressive type of skin cancer with a high potential of metastasis and ability to develop resistance to most of the known anticancer agents. Metastatic melanoma is associated with poor prognosis and 5-year survival rate of less than 20%. The goal of this project is to develop novel thiazole analogs which can be used to treat melanoma and enhance their delivery to melanoma tumors using polymeric nanoparticles. Dr. Li has extensive experience in molecular modeling, organic synthesis, in vitro and in vivo biological assays.