For the past two years, Dr. Kamil Rahme, Associate Professor at the Department of Sciences – Faculty of Natural and Applied Sciences (FNAS) at Notre Dame University-Louaize (NDU), has been involved in an extensive research project: synthesizing Gold and Silver Nanoparticles with the potential ability to be loaded with a therapeutic agent and a targeting agent that recognizes PC3 prostate cancer cells. In other words: using tiny particles of gold and silver to assist with the delivery of cancer-killing medicines into certain types of prostate cancer cells.
Funded by the National Council for Scientific Research – Lebanon (CNRS), the project has so far produced five international conference proceeding papers published between 2017 and 2018, a review paper published in the International Journal of Nanomedicine in 2017, and a paper published in the Journal of Nanomaterials in 2018. A third paper is currently being drafted, with ongoing cooperation between Dr. Rahme, Dr. Esther Ghanem, Assistant Professor at the Department of Sciences – FNAS at NDU, the Lebanese University, and University College Cork, Ireland (UCC).
To maintain continuity, Dr. Rahme is working in collaboration with Dr. Justin Holmes, Professor of Nanochemistry in the School of Chemistry at UCC, Dr. Caitriona O'Driscoll, Professor and Chair of Pharmaceutics in the School of Pharmacy at UCC, and Dr. Jianfeng Guo, Professor of Biopharmaceutics at Jilin University China, to perform in vivo studies on mice. So far, this collaboration has resulted in one more publication in the most recent (2019) edition in the European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics.
An additional CNRS funded project with Dr. Ghanem is also aiming to target Prostate Cancer with antibodies, with three more papers on this topic still planned. Of these, one paper, published in the International Journal of Molecular Science, has already come to fruition, again in 2019.