Q: What part of your career would have most impressed your teenage self?
A: The fact that I designed a medicine component from scratch that has now been tested in humans and has the potential to make a difference to healthcare.
Q: What has been the most surprising breakthrough in which you have been involved?
A: The fact that a small chemical change to a protein in our body, changes the way that protein interacts with cells – allowing it to act as a specific drug transporter into cancer cells. This was a surprising finding.
Q: What branches of medicine do you think will be most impacted by your team’s work on nanomedicine?
A: Our focus is now on ophthalmology and so we are hoping to be able to make an impact on eyecare.
Q: How hopeful are you that the work of your team will be able to impact global healthcare rather than the healthcare of the most wealthy?
A: This is something that we are always concerned about and we would hope that our medicines would not be too expensive and thus have an impact on a variety of populations.
Q: Your profile shows that you are frequently involved in encouraging diversity in academic study and STEM in particular. What advice would you have for bright young people who enjoy science but think that academic research might not be for “people like them”?
A: It is always difficult to give advice as an older woman. I doubt that I would have taken advice from an older academic when I was comparatively young. Here is the advice I wish I had been given and actually taken: There are no barriers that you cannot break and it would be foolish to assume that barriers do not exist, but we all have one goal – to go out and smash those barriers down by demonstrating our excellence in everything that we do.
Thank you to Dame Ijeoma for taking the time to answer our questions.
Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu will be giving her talk – Small Particles, Big Impact: Revolutionising Drug Delivery – at the Renold Building, Manchester, on Thursday 20 March.
Image credit: Phil Mynott
