Education

Ph.D., Chemistry, University of Roorkee, India (1972)

Research Areas and Projects

Dr. Gupta’s current major interests are to develop new prevention and treatment strategies by intervention with dietary constituents (such as berries, common spices), novel subcutaneous polymeric implantable devices embedded with test agents for systemic and local delivery, and milk-derived exosomes as nano carriers for oral delivery of both standard drugs and natural agents with therapeutic activity, as well as identify molecular targets. The common experimental models and laboratory techniques performed routinely in his laboratory include, cell culture, wild-type and xenograft models for lung cancer and breast cancer, ³²P-postlabeling DNA adduct assay, qPCR, western, tumor imaging, and HPLC coupled with various detectors. His laboratory was the first to demonstrate that berries  are effective beyond the GI tract by showing significant inhibition of estrogen-mediated breast cancer and lung cancer. The ongoing work with phenolics isolated from these berries have demonstrated that berry phenolics can have significant synergistic activity towards anti-proliferation, apoptosis and anti-inflammation due to attack of different bioactives on distinct or overlapping protein targets against lung cancer. These findings have been confirmed in cell culture and tumor models. His laboratory’s present major thirst is on drug delivery for enhanced therapeutic response. The most recent development is a novel technology for oral delivery of drugs using bovine milk-derived exosomes (biological nanoparticles) as a carrier for small drug molecules, as well as macromolecules such as siRNAs. This technology is emerging as a major drug delivery technology in the field with potentially wide therapeutic applications. His laboratory has trained numerous graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, residents, undergraduates and High School students. His laboratory is currently supported by a postdoctoral fellow, two PhD students and two junior faculty.