Team wins Blaze Venture, pursues drug delivery for expanded use of cancer drug

Always motivated by curiosity and her interests in research, UIC engineering student Jenny Huang entered the Blaze Venture Challenge. The Blaze Venture is an annual UIC pitch challenge that encourages student entrepreneurship and innovation where participants can win cash prizes, meet world-class mentors, and gain experience in pitching to investors. She won the $2,000 UIC Blaze Venture Comcast Community Health Impact Award.

While working in the lab of Ying Liu—Dr. Satish C. and Asha Saxena Professor of Chemical Engineering and Interim Associate Dean of Research—Huang was encouraged by Liu to enter the challenge.

Their project introduced an injectable form of pazopanib, a cancer drug, using a new technology called nanoPAZ. NanoPAZ encapsulates the drug inside nanoparticles. In turn, this makes it more stable and potentially allowing for targeted, precise drug delivery. This approach could improve effectiveness while addressing the underlying causes of a disease.

“The problems with a lot of hydrophobic drugs, including pazopanib, is that they’re difficult to dissolve in the bloodstream and have limited bioavailability,” Huang said. “When taken orally, these medications can build up in the liver and become toxic, cause high blood pressure, and have other side effects.”

Pazopanib is a type of VEGF inhibitor, a drug that blocks a protein responsible for the growth of new blood vessels. As VEGF plays a role in several processes tied to disease progression, Huang and Liu explored whether pazopanib could be used for the treatment of osteoarthritis. Their research suggests that pazopanib helps to relieve joint pain and may slow cartilage degeneration.

Huang noted that this is promising as there are no cures or treatments that can modify osteoarthritis, only ones that temporarily ease the pain without addressing the underlying mechanisms of the disease.

Huang said that their technology stands out because it overcomes previous challenges with how the drug is formulated. In earlier studies using a mouse model of osteoarthritis, Liu’s lab saw promising results, both in managing joint pain and in slowing cartilage breakdown.

She added while presenting to the judges, they were impressed by the amount of research that has been done and that they’ve seen a lot of results.

“We both agreed the challenge was a great opportunity to get entrepreneurship experience in biotechnology, biomedical science and engineering, and build experience,” Huang said. Through their startup, CurMed Pharmaceuticals, Huang and Liu also plan on applying to small business grants and connecting with Venture Capitalists. CurMed was founded to support the development of nanomedicine and help move the technology toward real-world applications.

Liu noted Huang is currently handling almost everything for their startup.

Huang said that one of the most memorable parts of the competition was trying to summarize the more technical elements of their research into a readily communicable speech to an audience without this kind of background. She also expressed her gratitude for Liu’s guidance and mentorship.

Huang encouraged other young entrepreneurs to pursue their ideas.

“If you think you have a marketable product, then go for it,” she said. “There’s not much to lose. I think the experience of pursuing entrepreneurship itself as well can be great for learning communication skills that you don’t often find if you’re working at the bench. I think that it’s important to develop those networking and public speaking skills because that’s important when you have valuable technology that can take off. In particularly, you need to communicate that and to create a platform where that can be shared with other people.”

Huang is a student in UIC’s Guaranteed Professional Program Admissions (GPPA). The GPPA provides a group of incoming students guaranteed admissions to various graduate or professional degree programs. With the security of GPPA, students can focus on undergraduate studies and have the freedom to pursue many subject areas and disciplines. Huang is currently studying neuroscience and computer science as an undergraduate student and will pursue a Doctor of Medicine post-graduation.