Harsha Rajkumar

As more small-molecule anticancer drugs are developed, a major obstacle to overcome is their limited selectivity and cytotoxicity to healthy cells, causing side effects such as hair loss, anemia, and weakened immune systems, therefore lowering its overall therapeutic efficacy despite their high potencies.

In my time at ASDRP, my group and I explored a novel class of immunotherapeutics and other prodrugging strategies to mitigate the onset of issues stemming from traditional small molecule chemotherapies. In collaboration with a local biotech company, our research group developed novel linkers to conjugate cytotoxic payloads to their antibodies. In addition, our group explored a photocaging strategy to release cytotoxic payloads at will.