Heart attack treatment hasn’t evolved much over the past 20 years, especially when compared to, say, cancer treatment, which has seen an explosion of therapy breakthroughs. For heart attacks, a leading cause of death, treatment often includes medications, catheter-based interventions like stenting, and in some cases, surgery. However, current treatment is not very effective, says Juliane Nguyen, professor in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s division of pharmacoengineering and molecular pharmaceutics. But she’s working to change that.
“One of the challenges of treating heart attacks is getting sufficient amounts of therapeutics to the heart,” she says. The heart receives only five percent of the blood volume, so most of the therapeutic agents end up reaching other organs.
To solve that problem, Nguyen is developing “Zippersomes,” which combine biologic therapeutics that repair the heart with proteins that make them “sticky,” thereby leading to an accumulation of the therapeutics at the heart where they’re needed.
Using Zippersomes, “we are able to capture subsequent doses of therapeutics directly to the first dose,” says Nguyen, the latest guest in the video series “North Carolina Innovators You Should Know,” hosted by Eshelman Innovation Executive Director John Bamforth.
