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GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) - Happy Tech Tuesday, I’m Melanie Morón with UF Innovate and today I am joined by Mei Hei with the College of Pharmacy who is finding innovative drug delivery systems. Mei, thanks so much for having us here in your lab.

Yeah, thank you for having me, Melanie. It’s great to be here.

To start off, what do you do here at UF and what is your research opus?

Yeah, I’m a associate professor at UF College of Pharmacy, so my research mainly focused on the exosomes, which is a small nano-vesicle secrete from living cell for drug delivery, and then there’s the biological material, very biocompatible, naturally derived, so it’s actually best efficiency for delivery drug for the human beings.

And why is your research so important?

So, it actually can really advance the drug delivery process. For the drug discovery it take a lot effort to have effective drug, but the delivery, if not be able to target the tissue, then the drug not going to be effective, so our novel approach going to use natural-derived cell materials to deliver those drug in the in vivo human body system to maximum that drug efficacy.

So explain to me, how does this drug delivery work?

So the nano-vesicles, they actually uptaking as the oral pill or the drops or the injection into the body, they need to transfer and circulate around the body and get to the disease location, so those nano-vesicles are highly biocompatible. They are really compatible to the human body circulation system and to be uptaking by the cells that are located in the disease sites.

And lastly, where do you see your research in the next couple of years?

So I see my research eventually be able to develop into the clinical trials and we hope our research can be a real therapy approved by the FDA and be able to use by the patients.

Well, Mei, thanks again for having us here and talking to us about your research.

Yes, thank you. Great talk to you. Yes.

And that’s another wonderful Tech Tuesday. We hope to see you next week.

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