Ankit D. Kanthe, Doctoral Program Chemical Engineering
Advisers: Dr. Raymond Tu & Dr. Charles Maldarelli
Date of Thesis Defense December 2020
Ankit D. Kanthe received his bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, India in 2016 and began his graduate studies at the City College in the Fall of 2016 under the mentorship of Professors Charles Maldarelli and Raymond Tu. Ankit’s research is done in collaboration with the NSF’s ChemMatCARS at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Lab and Bristol Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Co. His doctoral work focused on the development and use of new methodologies to study the phase behavior and adsorption of biomacromolecules such as antibodies at the air/water interface. Ankit was a recipient of the FasTRAC award at the APS in 2018 to conduct experiments at the beamline for his Ph.D. thesis. In 2019, he interned at Bristol Myers Squibb where he was responsible for developing the kinetic model to understand the monoclonal antibody/surfactant system. He also had the opportunity to travel to France in the summer of 2019, where at the SOLEIL synchrotron, he studied the adsorption of novel helical molecules containing multiple helicenes at the air/water interface. The project was done in collaboration with Dr. Colin Nuckolls of Columbia University. A second industry internship was completed in 2020 at Janssen R&D, developing a pipeline to perform molecular dynamics simulations for FDA-approved excipients using SILCSBio to guide the formulation team in selecting stabilizing excipients. He is the lead author/co-author on multiple publications and conference presentations.
Thesis Title and Impact
Dynamics And Phase Behavior Of Mixed Antibody-Excipient Adsorption At An Air/Water Interface
The main impact of his research is in assisting the pharmaceutical industry to understand the stability of therapeutics during the manufacturing, storage, and delivery via intravenous injection, of the drugs.
Findings/Outcomes
- Developed for the first-time theoretical tools to predict the molecular scale competitive adsorption mechanism between mAbs and excipients.
- Constructed and evaluated a set of fundamental parameters that can be used to optimize the formulation of biologics, enhancing the efficacy, shelf-life and decreasing waste in the processing of antibody-based therapeutics.
- Performed scaling analysis for the characterization of excipient-antibody formulations to predict the minimum excipient concentration for the IgG family therapeutic drugs
- Defined an orientational phase space during different stages of adsorption of mAbs at the air/water interface.
Publications
- Two Book Chapters and four journal publications