Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions - Individual Fellowships (IF). Metallodrugs Research Group

We would be interested in hosting a MSCA fellow to carry out a project that aims at synergistically combine the effect of our metallodrugs on the surfaced of nanoparticles, with the particular characteristics of the nano-material, with the ultimate aim of killing the cancer cell if not reversing or halting the carcinogenic machinery.

Our expertise resides in the design of the metallodrug and the effect of the nanosystem within the cancerous cell and the molecular level. The expertise of the Fellow would complement that of our group by sharing his/her knowledge on the nano-material and its exploitable trait for nanomedical purposes, including the instrumentation for nanomaterial activation when necessary.

The Fellow would work at the frontier of metallo-organic synthesis, cell biology and nanotechnology for biomedical applications.

We use metal coordination and organometallic chemistry principles to design novel potent switchable bio-catalytic metallodrugs. These allow us to use amplified chemical reactivity in a controlled manner to modulate the cancerous cell machinery at the molecular level.

On the one hand, our research seeks to exploit the physico-chemical features of the tumour (both intracellular and in the microenvironment) - resulting from their distinct metabolism, today known as the Warburg effect - for controlled drug activation (pro-drug approach).

On the other hand, it is our goal is to produce new metallo-organic drugs that can exert bio-catalytic activity inside human cancer cells. This effect on cells- amplified through catalysis - will aim to break their finely tuned redox homeostasis to eliminate cancer cells. Furthermore, some of the compounds produced in our lab are designed to disrupt the pH balance of the tumour cell by proton shuttling through the cell membrane in order to control cancer proliferation and stop invasion.

In addition, we take advantage on recent developments in nanomedicine to load our metallodrugs to a number of nano-systems which provide a variety of advantages, such as target cell accumulation, and enhanced bio-catalysis. Finally, a fundamental aspect of our research is to describe the chemical interactions of our metallodrugs with the intracellular components at the nanoscale.

Candidates are invited to submit their Expression of Interest directly to Dr. Ana María Pizarro (ana.pizarro@imdea.org) with subject MSCA-IF 2018 by the 31th of August 2018. The Expression of Interest should include a complete and updated CV with a brief description of the previous research and a motivation letter in ONE PDF file only.