Alexander V. Kabanov PhD, DSc

Alexander “Sasha” Kabanov, Ph.D., Dr.Sci., is the Mescal Swaim Ferguson Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and codirector of the Carolina Institute for Nanomedicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining UNC-Chapel Hill in July 2012, Kabanov served for nearly eighteen years at the University of Nebraska Medical Center where he was the Parke-Davis Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences and director of the Center for Drug Delivery and Nanomedicine, which he founded in 2004. Kabanov received his PhD in chemical kinetics and catalysis in 1987 at Moscow State University, USSR.

Kabanov has conducted pioneering research on polymeric micelles, DNA/polycation complexes, block ionomer complexes and nanogels for delivery of small drugs, and nucleic acids and proteins that have influenced considerably current ideas and approaches in drug delivery and nanomedicine. His work led to the first-in-man polymeric micelle drug (SP1049C) to treat cancer, which successfully completed Phase II clinical trial and is under further evaluation. He cofounded Supratek Pharma, Inc. (Montreal, Canada), which develops therapeutics for cancer, and Neuro10-9, Inc. (Omaha, Nebraska, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina), which focuses on diseases of the central nervous system.

Kabanov received the Lenin Komsomol Prize in 1988, an NSF Career Award in 1995, the University of Nebraska ORCA Award in 2007, and the University of Nebraska Medical Center Scientist Laureate in 2009, among other distinctions. He is also the recipient of a Russian Megagrant (2010). In 2013, he was elected as a member of Academia Europaea. Kabanov was director of the Nebraska Center for Nanomedicine, an NIH Center of Biomedical Research Excellence, from 2008 to 2012 and is a director of the Moscow State University Laboratory of Chemical Design of Bionanomaterials, which he founded at in 2010 with Megagrant support. In 2015 he became a director of the Carolina Cancer Nanotechnology Training program.