Speaker: Professor Dean Ho, Ph.D.Professor and Co-Director, UCLA Division of Oral Biology and Medicine and UCLA Bioengineering, The Weintraub Center for Reconstructive Biotechnology, Visiting Professor (Full-time July 2018), BME, Pharmacology, BIGHEART, National University of Singapore

Nanodiamonds possess uniquely faceted surfaces that have mediated markedly improved efficacy and safety for a number of applications including drug/gene delivery and contrast imaging. Nanodiamond-modified drugs have also been used to address a broad spectrum of indications ranging from oncology to infectious diseases and wound healing to regenerative medicine, among others. Based on the extensive biocompatibility studies that have validated nanodiamond safety, we have recently initiated a clinical trial for a nanodiamond-embedded biomaterial (NDGP). The initial progress showed that NDGP was well tolerated with no evidence of re-infection and no apparent impairment of tissue healing. As the nanodiamond and broader nanomedicine fields continue to progress towards clinical implementation, it is evident that monotherapy mediated by nanotechnology, while potentially more effective than unmodified therapy, will eventually need to transition to combination therapy. Unfortunately, current combination therapy design approaches challenge the global optimisation of multi-drug treatment. To overcome this barrier, our team has developed an augmented AI platform to simultaneously optimise both the drugs and their respective doses from a virtually infinite parameter space, realizing powerful novel combination therapies. Our augmented AI platform has been clinically validated in multiple in-human trials, and has also been harnessed to optimise nanomedicine-based combination therapy. Based on the intersection of AI and nanomedicine, this lecture will highlight our recent clinical trials of both nanotechnology-modified biomaterials and optimised combinatorial drug development.