Events

Date: 5 March 2025   Time: 14:00 - 15:00     

Location: GO Jones LT

Therapeutic Materials via Molecular Engineering

Professor Sébastien Perrier

Department of Chemistry and Medical School

University of Warwick

s.perrier@warwick.ac.uk

Nanomedicine, the application of nanotechnology to healthcare, is revolutionising the medical field, by providing new effective solutions as therapeutics and diagnostics. One of the most promising applications of nanomedicine is in targeted delivery, where nanoparticles are engineered to carry active agents, including drugs, genes, etc, to specific cells or tissues in the body, thus reducing the drugs side effects and improving their efficacy. Nanoparticles can also be used to develop new diagnostic tools, for example by conjugation to antibodies that bind to specific disease markers for their detection. Our research focuses on the development of polymeric materials with applications in nanomedicine. With labs in both Chemistry and the Medical School, we take materials from their molecular design to their in vitro and in vivo applications, in fields including drug delivery, antimicrobials and antibacterial materials, diagnostics, and also as probes to investigate cell mechanisms. The lecture will present examples of our latest findings in the synthesis and applications of novel vectors for drug delivery and antimicrobial materials.

Professor Sébastien Perrier graduated from the Ecole National Supèrieure de Chimie de Montpellier, France, in 1998. He undertook his PhD at the University of Warwick, England, in polymer chemistry, and spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Advances Macromolecular Design (University of New South Wales), Australia. He started his academic career at Leeds in 2002 as a lecturer, then moved to the University of Sydney in 2007, as director of the Key Centre for Polymers & Colloids. In October 2013, Sébastien was appointed as the Monash-Warwick Alliance Chair in Polymer Chemistry, a joint appointment between the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick, UK, and the Faculty of Pharmacy at Monash University, Australia. Sébastien's team focuses on the use of macromolecular engineering to design functional nanostructured materials, with applications ranging from material science to nanotechnology and nanomedicine. He has published over 300 articles, which have received over 25,000 citations, and supervised to date 50 PhD students and 31 postdocs. He has held a wide range of active roles in his discipline through involvements in professional and technical societies, including Macro Group UK, Australian RACI Polymer division, IUPAC committee, chairing of international conferences and through membership of editorial boards of international peer reviewed journals from RSC, ACS and Wiley. He is currently the editor in Chief of ACS Polymers Au. His recent awards include the Macro Group UK Medal (Macro Group UK, 2018), the RSC Interdisciplinary Award (RSC, 2024) and a Royal Society Industry Fellowship (Royal Society, 2024).