Dr. Kamaljit Kaur is an Associate Professor of Targeted Drug Delivery and Biomedical Diagnostics at the Chapman University School of Pharmacy, CUSP.

Dr. Kaur received her Ph.D. in 1999 in Bioorganic Chemistry from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Wesleyan University, CT, before moving to the University of Alberta, Canada, where she joined the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences as an Assistant Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in 2004. She moved to Chapman University at Irvine, CA, in 2014 to accept a part-time position as a Distinguished Chancellor Fellow and in 2015 as a full-time founding member of the CUSP faculty.

Over the past decade, the Kaur group has contributed to the development of cancer cell-specific peptides and peptide-drug conjugates, PDCs, as a new modality for breast cancer treatment. Her group has also developed multiple peptide-based platforms with different transduction methods for detecting cancer cells and bacteria from liquid samples. She has published 69 peer-reviewed articles, h-index = 31, 4 book chapters, been listed as an inventor in 3 approved patents, and has presented 27 invited talks. She serves on the review panel of several granting agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, NIH, and Canadian Institutes of Health Research, CIHR. She is currently an editorial board member for Scientific Reports and Pharmaceutics.

Conventional chemotherapy remains the treatment of choice for many cancers. However, it is constantly challenged by poor selectivity and limited access of drugs to the cancer cells. Targeted drug delivery methods have been explored to improve drug efficacy and selectivity by directing the drug to the cancer site. In recent years, a number of peptides have been identified for delivering drugs and diagnostic elements specifically to the cancer site.

Using peptide array-whole cell binding assay, we have identified several peptides which selectively bind melanoma or triple-negative breast cancer, TNBC, cells. One peptide we identified targets a novel cell-surface receptor, Keratin 1, in TNBC cells. These peptides are either conjugated to chemotherapeutics or co-administered to enhance the cytotoxicity and efficacy of chemotherapy for TNBC or melanoma treatment. Targeting TNBC and melanoma is important because these are more aggressive cancer types, and there are limited treatment options for patients with these cancers. Chemotherapy is the mainstay of treatment for TNBC, while melanoma is notoriously resistant to chemotherapy.

Here we will present our results for the design and evaluation of cancer cell targeting peptides, the target receptor in cancer cells, and efficacy of peptide-drug conjugates or co-treatment using cell and mice xenograft models.