Professor Arturo Vegas

Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Professor Vegas received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Harvard University working with Stuart Schreiber. He then did postdoctoral studies with Robert Langer and Daniel Anderson at MIT in the fields of chemical and biomedical engineering. Since joining the faculty at BU in 2015, projects in the Vegas lab are focused on developing novel chemical tools, materials and approaches for targeting therapeutics to diseased tissues, with an emphasis on cancer and diabetes. These new tools will facilitate studies in the lab to understand mechanisms that control the physiological distribution of therapeutics and informing future targeting element design. Researchers in the lab design and implement synthetic methods to create novel targeting moieties and materials and link them to payloads with therapeutic value or potential. These constructs will then be evaluated at the protein and cellular levels, with lead constructs being advanced into animal studies. Techniques, methods, and approaches from organic synthesis, chemical biology, materials science, and biomedical engineering will be integrated to address these challenging problems in drug delivery.