There is a particular frustration in oncology that does not get discussed enough outside of research circles: cancer adapts. You give a patient a drug. It works — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes briefly — and then the tumour finds a way around it. Drug resistance is not a fringe problem; it is one of the central obstacles in cancer treatment, and it is one that chemists, engineers, and clinicians have been wrestling with for decades.
Paula Hammond, a professor at MIT and one of the most respected materials engineers working in drug delivery today, has spent much of her career working on this exact problem. Her approach is elegant in the way that good science usually is: instead of simply finding a better drug, she is redesigning how drugs are delivered.
Layers, Literally
Hammond’s group is known for a technique called layer-by-layer (LbL) assembly. The concept is almost deceptively simple. You take a surface — say, a nanoparticle — and coat it with alternating layers of oppositely charged materials, building up a thin, structured film one layer at a time. Think of it like laying down sheets of cling film, except each sheet is nanometres thick and chemically active.
What this allows you to do is load different therapeutic agents into different layers of that coating. One layer might carry a chemotherapy drug. Another might carry a small RNA molecule designed to silence a gene that makes cancer cells resistant to treatment. Both are released in a controlled sequence, once the nanoparticle reaches its target.
The result is a nanoparticle that does not just deliver one drug — it delivers a coordinated therapeutic strategy. That matters enormously in cancers where single-agent therapy has a documented tendency to fail.
Why This Is Not Just a Lab Curiosity
Drug delivery research has a reputation — not entirely unfair — for producing exciting results in mice that quietly disappear before reaching patients. Hammond’s group is unusually focused on translation: making things that could, eventually, work in a clinical setting.
Her lab has applied LbL technology to ovarian cancer, bladder cancer, and RNA-based therapies, among others. The technique is also being explored in wound healing and immunotherapy contexts. It is the kind of platform technology that, once developed, can be adapted across problems — which is arguably what makes it scientifically valuable rather than just academically interesting.
A Career Worth Paying Attention To
Hammond was the first Black woman to be named an Institute Professor at MIT — the university’s highest faculty honour — and the first woman and first person of colour to serve as Head of Chemical Engineering there. These are worth noting, not to tick a diversity box, but because they reflect something real: she built an exceptional scientific career in a field where the structural obstacles for women, and particularly for Black women, have historically been significant.
What I Find Interesting About This
What strikes me most about Hammond’s research is that it reframes the drug delivery question. Instead of asking what drug to give, it asks how to give it — in what order, in what combination, at what rate. That is a surprisingly powerful shift in thinking. Nanotechnology, at its most useful, is not about making things small for the sake of it. It is about gaining control over processes that, at larger scales, you simply cannot manage with the same precision.
