Welcome to the Murthy Laboratory! We are primarily interested in developing new molecules for molecular imaging and drug delivery.  Our lab is composed of an interdisciplinary mix of chemists, biochemists, biologists and biomedical engineers.  Projects in the lab are highly collaborative, and usually involve collaborations with medical or biomedical scientists from other universities.  A key focus of the lab is applying organic chemistry to solve biomedical problems.  Students and Postdocs trained here usually develop the ability to design and synthesize new molecules, as well as the ability to identify important and emerging biomedical problems.  We are always looking for motivated scientists, and if you are interested in the work we are doing, please send us an email.  Lab activities can broadly be divided into the following areas:

Molecular Imaging

We are very interested in developing contrast agents that can image infectious diseases and oxidative stress.   To address this problem our lab has assembled an interdisciplinary group of scientists from different backgrounds including chemistry, material science, biology, biomedical engineering and medicine.  We have recent developed novel molecular imaging probes for the in vivo imaging of bacterial infection and reactive oxygen species.  Our ROS probe is now commercially available from LICOR Bioscines, under the name ROSstar.

Drug Delivery

We are developing novel methods to deliver proteins, nucleic acids and small molecules to cells for the treatment of a variety of diseases.  Recent developments include delivery vehicles for transcription factors, auto-catalytic drug delivery vehicles and new oral protein delivery vehicles.  We also have a long standing interest in designing new materials for intracellular protein delivery.