Yong Hu, of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Nanjing University, China, studies the encapsulation and delivery of drugs to specific sites in the body. His work focusses on the development of nanomaterials that confer minimal loss of their cargo before they arrive at the site where the drug is needed to be administered.

 What inspired you to become a scientist? 

When I was a graduate student doing polymeric chemistry, I read a piece of news about drug delivery systems; it was the first time I realized that research work could directly benefit our lives, and it was this that encouraged me to become a scientist. However, in our university, we did not have enough reading material about the drug delivery systems, so I wrote a letter to a very famous scientist, Professor Robert S. Langer (a pioneering scientist in tissue engineering and drug delivery systems at MIT), to ask him to send me a review paper he had published. After one month, I received the hard copy of this paper from Professor Langer, which encouraged me to select drug delivery systems as my research field.     

   What was your motivation behind the work described in your ChemComm article? 

While there is alot of excellent work about the drug carriers, most of it focuses on how to encapsulate different drugs and deliver them to the desired site, however a rather limited amount of work focuses on controlling the release of the drug during the delivery process. Thus we want to reduce the drug loss before it arrives at its target place and increase the speed of releasing the drug in the cell.    

   Why did you choose ChemComm to publish your work? 

Every week, I will skim through ChemComm to see what kind work is published in this journal, because ChemComm is a high quality journal in chemistry and has a global readership. Although ChemComm has a long history, it is also sensitive to new fields, and there is some excellent work about drug delivery systems published in this journal. When we decided to submit our manuscript to ChemComm, we knew it would be disseminated broadly and more researchers could share our results.    

   Where do you see your research heading next? 

We are currently conducting more in-depth investigations into this pH sensitive drug delivery system including the anti-tumor animal model so we can gain a better understanding of its fate and the effect when it is administrated into the body.   

   What do enjoy doing in your spare time? 

I like to spend time with my family. I also like cooking food at the weekend and traveling with my wife.

   If you could not be a scientist, but could be anything else, what would you be? 

To be honest, if I could not be a scientist, I would like to be a farmer. I enjoy the lifestyle of working with nature. 

Interviewed by Katie Dryden-Holt