Angus Johnston

Nanomaterials for Biology Group: Using Nanotechnology to Unravel the Secrets of Biology

Targeted delivery of drugs to the specific areas in the body where they are active has the potential to greatly improve the way we treat diseases such as cancer, HIV and diabetes. Recent advances in nanotechnology allow us to synthesise nanoparticles that encapsulate drugs, protecting the body from their harmful side effects and also protecting the drugs from being degraded in the body. Using targeting molecules such as antibodies, these nanoparticles can be delivered to specific cells where the drug is active. While this field shows great promise, our understanding of how these particles interact with biological systems is still very limited.

Our group is focused on developing a fundamental understanding of how nanoengineered materials interact with biological systems, with the goal to develop improved methods of drug and vaccine delivery.

One of the main challenges of understanding how nanomaterials interact with cells is determining exactly where the material is located inside the cell. Cells contain hundreds of sub-compartments that have different chemical and enzymatic environments, and understanding what these environments are like is critical to designing materials that will respond in a desirable fashion once they are inside the cell. We are developing molecular sensors that can detect the local environment that the capsules are exposed to.

Using these sensors we are also investigating the mechanisms of how nanocapsules enter cells and looking at the role that particle size, surface functionality and targeting molecules play in this process.

The work in our group includes:

• engineering new materials with bio-responsive properties,
• developing molecular sensors for biological sensing,
• studying the in vitro behaviour of nanomaterials, and
• applying super-resoluting imaging techniques for material characterisation.