Shiladitya Sengupta, assistant professor of medicine at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and Brigham and Women's Hospital, has won one of three 2006 Era of Hope Scholar Awards from the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program.
Sengupta will receive $4.1 million in funding over five years.
The award recognizes scientists early in their careers "who have shown a strong potential for leadership in the breast cancer research community as well as a vision for the eradication of breast cancer, particularly through innovative projects and multi-institutional collaborations," according to the DOD.
Earlier this year Sengupta and colleagues announced in the journal Nature their creation of an anti-cancer drug-delivery device dubbed the nanocell. This novel technology has the potential to eliminate the devastating systemic toxicity caused by chemotherapy by directing drugs to act only where they are needed.
The Era of Hope award will allow Sengupta to continue work on inventive solutions to breast cancer. It will also further the efforts of the HST-BWH Center for Biomedical Engineering, which is committed to using novel technologies to improve medical diagnostics and therapeutics, especially focusing on global health.
--Elizabeth Dougherty, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on January 24, 2007 (download PDF).
