Raj Rajasekaran, Ph.D President and CEO
Dr. Rajasekaran was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Drs. David Sabatini and Gert Kreibich at NYU medical center where he studied basic mechanisms of protein translation and translocation across endoplasmic reticulum. He did a second postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Enrique Rodriquez-Boulan at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University where he studied protein sorting in polarized epithelial cells. Here, he developed interest in epithelial tight junctions and discovered a novel mechanism of protein targeting to the tight junction. At Cornell he invented a microprocessor controlled cell homogenizer and other devices for molecular biology research. At the University of California, Los Angeles he made many seminal basic and translational cancer research findings. His research demonstrated that the beta-subunit of sodium pump (an enzyme involved in sodium and potassium ion homeostasis) is a cell adhesion molecule and is lost when normal cells transforms into cancer cells.
The function of a cancer biomarker prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA) in inducing cancer cell aneuploidy and a novel methionine-leucine based internalization signal for PSMA were demonstrated. His research group developed the first polymeric nanoparticles mediated drug delivery approach for childhood leukemia. More recently his work demonstrated that cancer cells acts as an infectious agent and has the potential to transform neighboring normal cells. He has four issued US patents and has published more than 85 research articles. Link for Dr. Rajasekaran’s NIH sponsored research publications:
PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India
Post-doctoral training in basic cancer cell biology at New York University Medical Center and the Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Faculty Department of Cell Biology and the Director of the 3D (confocal) Microscopy Facility at the Cornell University
Faculty, University of California, (Los Angeles) cancer research and completion of Executive MBA at the UCLA Anderson School of Management
Founding director of the Cancer Center at the Alfred I DuPont Hospital for children, Wilmington, Delaware
Additional appointments include:
Professor of Pediatrics, Thomas Jefferson University,
Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Delaware
Senior Research Scientist at Helen F Graham Cancer Center
Adjunct Professor, Lankenau Institute of Medical Research