The University of Manchester has announced the appointment of Professor Kostas Kostarelos a world-leading academic, who is playing a pivotal role in nanomedicine - a growing field with potential to benefit patients suffering from neurodegenerative disease and cancer. Professor Kostarelos will join the University in June.
Professor Kostas Kostarelos also brings to Manchester his Nanomedicine Laboratory which generates tiny materials to assist clinicians and is ranked among the top in the world.
His appointment, along with his 15-strong team of scientists, will help bring graphene closer to medicine with collaborations across the University and with its partner hospitals.
It follows a three-year collaboration with the University’s Nobel Laureates Professor Andre Geim and Professor Kostya Novoselov, who first isolated graphene, the world’s thinnest, strongest and most conductive material, in 2004. This led to the discovery of a whole new family of one-atom-thick materials.
Professor Kostarelos’s expertise includes developing minuscule needles to inject drugs into brain and other cells which in the future could help the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. He sees great potential to use graphene in medicine.
The move north was also prompted by the opportunity to work more closely with academics and clinicians in The University of Manchester, the Manchester Academic Health Sciences Network (MAHSC) and the Manchester Cancer Research Centre (MCRC).
MAHSC, a partnership between the University and six NHS organisations, brings clinicians and academics together to work on rapid dissemination and translation of health research and education in to practice to benefit patients. MCRC is a partnership between The University, The Christie Hospital and Cancer Research UK.
Professor Kostas Kostarelos said, "Our Nanomedicine Lab has been collaborating with Manchester since 2010 in order to develop and use graphene material safely and effectively in medicine. Along with the activities around the creation of the National Graphene Institute in Manchester and the EU-funded Graphene Flagship research programme, we will surely expand and reinforce this collaboration. Our broader aim is to bring graphene closer to medicine across The University of Manchester campus and its great hospitals."
Professor Kostya Novoselov added, "There is great potential for using graphene for medical applications and procedures and I am greatly looking forward to working with Professor Kostarelos on this fascinating and important area. He brings a wealth of world-class experience in the field of nanomedicine.”
Professor Kostarelos trained as a chemical engineer and graduated from Imperial College London. He has held posts at the University of California in San Francisco, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre and Weill Medical College of Cornell University both in New York, Imperial College and University College London. His research has raised more than £7million of direct grant funding for his Nanomedicine Lab during the last few years. The Nanomedicine Lab he founded is investigating novel gene therapies, clinical use of stem cells, advanced delivery systems for radio- and chemo-therapeutic agents against cancer and engineering smart vector systems for imaging and therapeutics.
