Investigator Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Mass General Research Institute

Associate Professor of Radiology Harvard Medical School

doxorubicin; islets of langerhans; islets of langerhans transplantation; magnetic resonance imaging; micrornas; molecular imaging; nanoparticles; rna, small interfering; spectroscopy, near-infrared Zdravka Medarova, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. She is a geneticist/cancer biologist by training and has an extensive background in molecular biology, genetics, and tumor biology and therapy. She developed the core nanodelivery platform and identified miR-10b as a promising therapeutic target in established metastases.

Specifically, the focus of her research has been the development and testing of multi-functional imaging/delivery vehicles for combined cancer imaging and therapy. Her earliest work described, for the first time, the design and application of ultrasmall iron oxide nanoparticles as imaging-capable carriers of siRNA to tumors.

This work generated substantial interest in the research community, since it illustrated the value of these nanoparticles for the delivery of small RNA therapy to challenging organ targets and also described an approach for the noninvasive monitoring of small RNA delivery. More recently, her lab developed magnetic nanoparticles as delivery vehicles of miRNA-targeted therapy to metastases.

This work resulted in multiple publications in high-impact journals such as Cancer Research, Nature Medicine, Oncogene, and Scientific Reports, as well as grants from private foundations and the NIH. ​​Dr. Medarova obtained a B.A. degree in pre-medicine from the University of Southern Maine (1998) and a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of New Hampshire (2002).