Profile of Mark E. Davis

In 1995, California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA) chemical engineering Professor Mark E. Davis faced an issue that would dramatically alter his primary area of research. His response to that challenge is sure to have lasting effects on drug design and the field of nanomedicine.

“Unfortunately, my wife had breast cancer,” he says somberly. An accomplished flautist, Mary Davis was only 36 when doctors diagnosed the disease and put her on aggressive chemotherapy. The painful drug regimen caused weakness, hair loss, nausea, and wrecked her immune system. The cure, it seemed, was almost worse than the disease. “I lived in the hospital with her for several months,” says Davis. “She was in isolation for a long time.”

From this ordeal, Davis and his wife knew that someone had to develop better treatments. She urged him to use the wealth of resources and the talents at California Institute of Technology to create specific therapeutics with fewer side effects. “I really got to see this whole cancer area: the issues, everything,” he says. During the days he spent in his wife's hospital room at the City of Hope Cancer Center (Duarte, CA), Davis read literature on carcinogenesis and cancer therapies, analyzing how he could best apply his engineering expertise to help with cancer treatment. “I was never afraid to go out of my area to learn new stuff, even as an undergraduate,” he reveals.

Davis' background as a chemical engineer with a history of designing catalytic materials, which are substances that speed up chemical reactions without being consumed in the process, gave him the necessary tools. Drug discovery and development is “in a classical sense, a big systems problem, and that's part of what engineering does,” he says. “A therapeutic, when you're going to stick it in someone's body, has to find …