Usern_member

Moein Moghimi

USERN Advisory Board USERN Policy Making Council

Professor Moein Moghimi, PhD


Member of the School of Medicine, Pharmacy and Health


Professor of Pharmaceutics in Undergraduate Pharmacy



Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 40401

Room number: F118, Wolfson Building, Queens Campus, Stockton on Tees, TS17 6BH


Appointments

Moein Moghimi joined Durham University in 2016 where he serves as Professor and Chair of Pharmaceutics at the School of Medicine, Pharmacy and Health. He is also a Full Affiliate Member/Professor at the Department of Translational Imaging, Houston Methodist Research Institute, Houston Methodist Hospital Systems (Houston, Texas, USA) and Adjoint Professor at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Colorado-Denver Medical Center (USA). In 2015, Moein was a Visiting Professor at Università Degli Studi Di Padova, Italy. Between 2008 and March 2016, he was based at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) serving as Professor of Nanomedicine at the Department of Pharmacy, Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanotechology at the NanoScience Centre, and the Founder and Director of the multi-million Euro Centre for Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology and Nanotoxiocology (the first interdisciplinary nanomedicine research centre in Denmark). Between 2008 and 2010, he further served as the Honorary Professor of Nanomedicine at the Multidisciplinary Research Center, Shantou University (China). His earlier appointments included a Senior Lectureship position in Biopharmacy and Molecular Pharmaceutics at the School of Pharmacy, University of Brighton and The University Research Fellow in Advanced Drug Delivery Systems at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Nottingham.

Over the past two decades, Professor Moghimi has been practicing in the capacity of advisor/consultant to over 50 pharmaceutical, biotechnology, health and food industries as well as investment banks, management consultancy firms and other entrepreneurial enterprises worldwide. He is a regular invited assessor and expert evaluator in nanomedicine/nanosafety programmes for governmental bodies, research councils and private organizations (over 50 establishments in 25 countries).

Research Activities/Awards

Professor Moghimi’s research activities are focused on pharmaceutical nanoscience, nanomedicine and nanosafety. More specifically, Professor Moghimi has made a major contribution to design and surface engineering of nanoparticles and functional nanosystems for parenteral site-specific targeting/drug delivery and imaging modalities (splenotropic entities, lymphotropic agents, ‘phagocyte-resistant’ nanoparticles, cerebral endothelial cell specific nanoplatforms and anti-cancer nanomedicine) as well as mechanistic understanding of nanomaterial/polymer-mediated infusion reactions and cell death processes. Professor Moghimi’s interdisciplinary research has been recognized by many international awards and to date he has been able to secure over €10 million in competitive research funds as principal investigator. Furthermore, he has partnered large-scale competitive European Commission FP-7 programmes in translational nanomedicine/drug delivery, addressing Alzheimer’s disease (The NAD Project) and atherosclerosis (CosmoPHOS NANO). In 2014 the NAD project was published as success story by Horizon 2020, endorsed by the EU President and received the prestigious Best Project Award in the category of completed projects under the European Union Framework programme in the field of industrial technologies. As of 2016, Professor Moghimi has edited multiple journal issues and is an author on >200 peer-reviewed journal articles and >10 patent/disclosure applications. He has given >300 invited seminars and keynotes in more than 30 countries.

A nanometer is 1000 million (one billion) times smaller than the world of meters. At nanoscale, materials and substances behave differently and show altered chemical and physical properties compared with their larger-particle kin. This incredibly low scale allows for unique interactions among atoms and their constituent parts and opening the path for the materials of the future including biomaterials and nanotherapeutics. The latter encompasses technologies and system approaches that achieve and facilitate earlier and more precise individual diagnosis, improved targeted therapies (eliminating side effects) and enhanced therapeutic monitoring. On a broader context, these approaches are enabling tools for personalized and targeted medicine that can deal with the grand challenges of chronic diseases in an aging population. Images above are examples of such technologies under development in this laboratory. The left-portion corresponds to cutting-edge multifaceted and “tailor-made” polymeric, lipid- and peptide-based nanoconstructs and drug delivery platforms capable of incorporating small molecules, diagnostic agents and biopharmaceuticals. These enabling technologies are directed for better management and more effective treatment of cancer, neurological pathologies (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease), cardiovascular diseases (e.g., atherosclerosis), arthritis, and allergy. The right-portion depict examples of targeted nanosystems in various human cell types, where intracellular trafficking and the fate of delivery systems is followed by real-time fluorescent microscopy and transmission electron microscopy.


Education/Training


Following completion of secondary education at d’Overbroeck’s College Oxford (UK), Moein studied biochemistry at the University of Manchester (UK) and in 1989 earned his PhD in biochemistry from Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School (Imperial College). He then completed a four-year SERC-funded post-doctoral training programme in Advanced Drug Delivery Research at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (University of Nottingham, UK).


Research Interests



  • Nanoparticle engineering for medicine

  • Systems approaches to site-specific targeting and controlled drug delivery and release

  • Nucleic acid therapeutics

  • Mechanistic aspects of injection-related adverse reactions to nanopharmaceuticals & nanomedicine

  • "Structure-activity" cascade and real-time medium-throughput integrated approaches for determination of nanopharmaceutical performance at cell and molecular levels

  • Mechanistic aspects of integrated efficacy-safety profiling of nanopharmaceuticals

  • Experimental T-cell therapies


Selected Publications


Chapter in book



Journal Article



 

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