Diana Goncalves Schmidt

The Goncalves Schmidt Lab is an inter- and multidisciplinary lab, which integrates nanotechnology for the design and production of two innovative drug delivery platforms, with the objective to treat aggressive types of cancer tumors.

Our first drug delivery agents are built out of DNA, and due to the high programmability and predictability of DNA, we can design and build very complex structures, while maintaining high structural precision on the nanometer scale. This nanoscale precision also enables the precise functionalization of the surface of the DNA-nanostructures with different groups, such as, peptides, gold nanoparticles, peptides, proteins, or therapeutic drug molecules.

Our other drug delivery platform are gold nanorods that we functionalize with biologically active small molecules that can be recognized and taken up selectively by specific types of cancer cells. Once these particles are inside cells, they can be irradiated with a near-infrared laser that locally heats up the cancer cells and kills them.

We are also interested in investigating the fate of DNA nanoparticles when they are inside cells. This is very important, since the efficiency and success of a drug is tightly related with its ability to escape intracellular compartments such as endosomes. If a drug stays too long or fails to escape the interior of an endosome, the combination of high concentration of enzymes with the low pH inside these compartments, will cause drug degradation, and thus, hinder its therapeutic effects.