Northeastern professor Mansoor Amiji was elected a 2024 lifetime fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for distinguished achievements over the course of his career.
Northeastern University professor Mansoor Amiji has developed targeted drug delivery methods for a variety of diseases, including cancer, inflammatory diseases and central nervous system disorders.
His expertise ranges from the development of these delivery systems to the development of biomaterials from natural and synthetic polymers to the application of nanotechnology in disease diagnostics, imaging and therapy.
In recognition of his career achievements in pharmaceutical sciences, Amiji was elected one of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2024 lifetime fellows.
“I’m really grateful to AAAS for selecting me to receive this honor,” says Amiji, university distinguished professor of pharmaceutical sciences and chemical engineering. “Nothing happens in a silo, and my every success is very much tied to all the students and postdocs who have trained and continue to work in my lab. I also have had some amazing mentors.”
Amiji is one of 471 scientists, engineers and innovators across two dozen disciplinary sections to receive the distinguished honor this year. The AAAS is one of the world’s largest general scientific communities.
“My affiliation in AAAS is really important because we continue to strive for greater awareness of the role of science and how scientific minds and ultimately scientific discoveries are so essential for the economic well-being of the United States and continue to allow us to be prosperous and continue to allow us to be healthy,” Amiji says.
Amiji first became excited about research while completing his pharmacy degree at Northeastern in the 1980s, working in a lab focused on improving cancer drugs safety by making them more selective to tumor cells.
Instead of pursuing pharmacy practice, he chose graduate school, where his early research explored biocompatibility of artificial organs and vessels with blood and clotting prevention.
After joining Northeastern as a professor in 1993, Amiji continued studying polymers as biomaterials, developing membranes and hydrogels — gel-like materials that absorb and retain water while maintaining their structure.
He later secured a National Institutes of Health grant for exploring application of hydrogels for delivering antibiotics locally in the stomach for treating Helicobacter pylori, a bacteria that causes ulcers.
A pivotal moment in his career came in 2000, when he took a sabbatical to study gene therapy in Robert Langer’s lab at MIT. He then began developing non-viral gene delivery systems, aligning with a growing NIH focus on gene therapy and nanotechnology.
Teaming up with Vladimir Torchilin, Northeastern’s distinguished professor of pharmaceutical sciences, Amiji worked on using nanotechnology to enhance cancer treatments, particularly in overcoming drug resistance.
This work continues today — Amiji’s lab applies nanotechnology to improve treatment of infectious diseases, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and inflammatory conditions affecting the liver and other organs.
Although most of his career has been in academia, Amiji values collaboration with physicians and industry partners to translate research into real-world solutions. He emphasizes that such collaborations early on help researchers address practical challenges, integrate solutions and avoid barriers in the development cycle to make sure innovative ideas reach patients.
For example, his collaboration with Recurv Pharma led to the development of a fish-oil-based nanoemulsion that acts like a Trojan horse, delivering a powerful anti-cancer drug directly to malignant cells in pancreatic cancer.
The challenge was that the drug was completely insoluble in water. Now, the nanoemulsion is in late development stage and advancing toward a treatment for multidrug-resistant cancers, including pancreatic, breast, ovarian and possibly colorectal cancer.
Over the past ten years, Amiji has collaborated with Benjamin Bleier, an ear, nose and throat surgeon at Mass Eye and Ear, on delivering drugs to the brain through the nose, particularly for treating Parkinson’s disease and neuroinflammation in different neurodegenerative diseases. The project has gained a lot of attention from the industry, Amiji says, which has become very interested in brain-targeted drug delivery.
About 150 postdocs, doctoral and master’s students and numerous undergraduate students and visiting scientists went through Amiji’s Translational Therapeutic Delivery Lab.
“I love training students and having them because they bring so much excitement and energy,” he says. “They also have this incredible ability to find some very innovative ways of solving problems.”