Daniel A. Heller, PhD

Head, Cancer Nanomedicine Laboratory Member,
Molecular Pharmacology Program, Sloan Kettering Institute
Co-Director, The Pat and Ian Cook Doctoral Program in Cancer Engineering
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Professor, Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine

We develop nanomaterials to accelerate the research, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer and allied diseases. These include nanotherapeutics to translocate tissue barriers via targeted drug delivery strategies and optical nanosensor technologies to facilitate the research, diagnosis, and monitoring of disease. Several examples of our projects include the following: Precision oncology aims drugs at many different therapeutic targets, but developers of nanotherapeutics for targeted drug delivery often face difficulty when encapsulating payloads with diverse structures. We developed quantitative methods to facilitate the encapsulation of many drug classes into nanoparticles, based on drug molecular structure, facilitating the rapid synthesis of diverse nanotherapeutics. We found that P-selectin, expressed endogenously on activated endothelium in tumors, can be used as a nanotherapeutic target improve the efficacy of precision therapies and to abrogate dose-limiting toxicities, to improve overall therapeutic index. P-selectin can be induced via ionizing radiation, enabling target enhancement in tumors. We found that endothelial targeting can improve delivery across intact blood-brain barrier for the treatment of intracranial tumors and metastases, by activating transendothelial transport. We develop optical nanosensor technologies using carbon nanotubes to facilitate the screening, diagnosis, and monitoring of diseases, and to build new assays for cancer drug development. These technologies employ the bandgap fluorescence of single-walled carbon nanotubes which emit in the near-infrared and can respond to analytes down to the single-molecule level. We have developed new sensors for the detection of metabolic changes in live cells and tissues to facilitate basic biological and drug discovery of lipid-related diseases, as well as a liquid biopsy platform for the detection of diseases in the absence of known biomarkers.