Engineered Nanoparticles vs Cancer: A big find on a small scale!
Academics are known for their attention to detail and nuance. Boiling down a complex thesis into a short presentation is really difficult for many scholars. This year in 3-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, Engineering faculty final competition took place on Wednesday, August 2,2017 at UNSW. 13 Competitors had exactly three minutes and one slide to present their work to a general audience.
Kumar Bishwajit Sutradhar, a PhD student in Biomedical Engineering in UNSW and one of the finalist who presented his research on surface engineered nanoparticles for the treatment of cancer. He said participating in 3MT for the first time this year was exciting because it showed he could break down his research and communicate to the general public, an important skill to have as a scientist.
“It was really challenging for me to simplify my research for general people within 180 seconds. however It was a really good experience and I learned a lot. I'm looking forward to do this again in next year” he said.
His presentation called ‘Engineered Nanoparticles vs Cancer: a big find on a small scale’ was based on research that involves developing target specific nanoparticles of cerium oxide with hyaluronic acid using a simple one-pot synthesis method that he developed in his research and use these nanoparticles to understand their interaction with human cancer cells.
“Cerium oxide nanoparticles gained a lot of attention in cancer research because of their amazing antioxidant property and this property can be explored in different ways for better understanding of tumor micro-environment and its function” he said.
“I’m attempting to prove that hyaluronic acid functionalised nanoparticles with higher cancer cell interaction will significantly reduce oxidative stress than the bare particles by which we can potentially stop cancer cells to grow and develop. I'm also exploring how these particles are inhibiting cancer cell migration which is really important to stop spreading tumor cells from one organ to another by a process called metastasis.”