A Fantastic Voyage to the Future of Nanomedicine | Randy Wadkins | TEDxUM

Imagine shrinking down robots to a size so small that they can be injected into humans. Imagine them swimming around in our bodies until they reach the sites of disease, where they apply treatment. That future is called nanomedicine, and it is almost here.

A native of Mississippi, Randy Wadkins has two degrees, a B.S. and a Ph.D. from The University of Mississippi. He has served stints at the Max Plank Institute in Germany, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Johns Hopkins, and for 2015-2016 is the inaugural Biophysical Society Congressional Fellow. The primary focus of Wadkins’s lab focuses on developing improved antitumor drugs of the camptothecin family. Camptothecins are among the most promising new antitumor agents available. His lab is working on a “third generation” of camptothecins that are superior in activity to the clinically-used 2nd generation agents CPT-11 and topotecan.