PhD in Biomedical Engineering

There is an urgent need for new convenient drug delivery platforms to combat global health challenges in infectious disease, including malaria, and especially within low to middle-income countries (LMIC). In 2021, there were 247 million cases of malaria and almost half of the global population was at risk of infection. In this project, the aim to develop a long-acting preventative strategy to deliver single or multiple malaria drugs within one injectable hydrogel depot. This strategy should eliminate pill fatigue encountered with existing oral therapies, enable better access to multiple drugs for a longer duration and be simple to administer in LMIC environments. To achieve this we will use a promising peptide-like peptoid-peptide system, which we recently published in the top Chemistry journal, the Journal of the American Chemical Society. This platform has proven to form a drug-releasing hydrogel implant in situ in response to enzymes present in the subcutaneous skin space. The objective is to select the most promising peptoid-peptide formulation and demonstrate in vivo practicality for at least 84-day drug delivery. This selection will be made by characterising the mechanical (rheology), structural (microscopy, spectroscopy, neutron scattering at large scale facilities), biocompatibility (toxicity, immune response) and stability profiles for each formulation and establishing their relationship to drug release in vitro.