Dr hab. nauk medycznych Ida Franiak-Pietryga, a scientist, who received her PhD in Biophysics and a higher doctorate in Cancer Biology/Genetics. Her experience includes over 20 years in biology and biophysics, trained in cancer, hematology and genetics, member of editorial boards in several journals, reviewer of numerous papers. Her career focus is translational research based on nanoparticles, specifically sugar-modified dendrimers, for drug design.
Dr. Franiak-Pietryga discovered that one of dendrimers, with sugar moiety attached to the outward facing bonds, can trigger leukemia cell “suicide”. This invention was awarded a gold medal at the “Concours Lepine”, an international invention fair in Paris in 2013.
To date, she holds two US patents and two PL patens for dendrimer based chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) therapy and three pending PCT patent applications on the use of glycodendrimers for CLL treatment.
She works at the Copernicus Memorial Hospital in Łódź and at the Medical University of Łódź in the Department of Clinical Laboratory Genetics, where she has been working on a gene therapy based on dendrimers on rhabdomyosarcoma tumors. She is a Senior Scientist at the University of California San Diego. In 2016-17 she was a Fulbright Scholar at Moores Cancer Center in San Diego, where she worked on nanoparticle-based therapies for breast cancer. Since 2017 she has been working with UC San Diego and UC Irvine on nanoparticle-based gene therapy for glaucoma. Dr. Franiak-Pietryga has a strong academic background developed collaborations with leading institutions throughout the world.