Prof Ezharul Hoque Chowdhury is a professor at Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University Malaysia, specialising in biomedical science. He completed his Doctor of Engineering at Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2003 under the supervision of Professor Toshihiro Akaike. Subsequently, he worked there as a research fellow and a team leader till the end of 2006 before joining as a tenure-track assistant professor at the same Institute and a visiting assistant professor at Shizuoka Cancer Center Institute. In 2011, he joined Monash University Malaysia as Senior Lecturer and promoted to Associate Professor in 2013.

Prof Ezharul has created a new branch in nanomedicine delivery by developing for the first time pH-sensitive inorganic nanoparticles with fascinating properties which confer notable advantages over the conventional carriers. This is indeed a substantial advancement in the field, considering the limitations of the existing nano-carriers, such as instability in plasma, insufficient release of drugs from the carriers and unwanted side-effects (toxicity). Despite tremendous efforts and heavy investment in the last four decades, due to the lack of an ideal delivery system with appropriate features to overcome those barriers, the world could not see the notable success of this particular field in clinical trials. Based on the highly promising pre-clinical data obtained in animal models with the smart nano-devices in delivering small molecule anti-cancer drugs, functional genes and selective siRNAs, Prof Ezharul is quite optimistic to see the actual success in clinical trials with his nano-formulations which showed impressive therapeutic efficacy with a drug dose almost 100-fold lower than that traditionally used. The rapid biodegradability of these mineral nanoparticles along with the requirement of pretty low amount of the drugs resulted in no adverse effects usually noticed with traditional nano-formulations. It should be noteworthy that his team has elucidated the mechanism of intracellular delivery of drugs using these particles, and additionally, cellular processing of the particle constituents released after particle dissolution. Additionally, the team has established the technology in delicately controlling the particle diameter for ensuring favourable pharmacokinetics as well as passive targeting of the nanoparticles to selective tissues having leaky vasculature. In order for receptor-mediated (active) targeting, multiple strategies have been designed for surface functionalization of nanoparticles based on electrostatic interactions between the nanoparticles and specific ligands.

So far, Prof Ezharul has achieved 25 research grants as principal investigator (PI) and has published more than 100 original articles in internationally reputed journals in addition to one complete written book. He is one of the inventors of seven US, Japanese and Malaysian patents some of which are already in the pipeline for being commercialized. His research profile can be found in the following websites:

http://umonash-my.academia.edu/EzharulHoqueChowdhury
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ezharul_Chowdhury/publications