Dr. Alabi is a biomedical engineer, whose work focuses on how to assemble synthetic macromolecules with precise control. His work is applicable both to creating new tools for research and to more efficient drug delivery.

Dr. Alabi received a B.S. from NYU and a B.E. from the Stevens Institute of Technology, before pursuing a Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology and a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. He has been a professor at Cornell since 2013. Since then, he has received an early-career faculty grant from the National Science Foundation and was named Professor of the Year by the Cornell chapter of Tau Beta Pi (an engineering honors society).

Delivering drugs to the affected part of the body remains a challenge in medicine: for instance, getting a chemotherapy drug to attack tumor cells without too much harm to healthy tissue. One attractive strategy is to use a “linker” to attach the drug to an antibody that recognizes only tumor cells. The antibody seeks out the tumor cells, bringing along the drug, which is then activated by breaking the linker. In this system, it would be important that the drug stays inactive until it reaches the tumor and that it becomes active once it gets there.

Often, engineers will test different linkers in an artificial system, where they have a lot of control and where it’s easy to see the results. However, these artificial environments are a lot simpler than what happens inside a real body, and so linkers that work really well in these tests don’t necessarily translate to working for real.

Dr. Alabi and his lab recently developed a strategy to better study and compare different kinds of linkers. They built a linker that contains two fluorescent dyes. When the linker is intact, the two dyes are too close together and they basically cancel each other out. However, when the linker is broken, the dye becomes visible, allowing researchers to watch when the linker breaks using a microscope.

To show that this is useful, they attached their new linker to an antibody against HER2, a protein that is present at abnormally high levels on the surface of some breast cancer cells. They treated breast cancer cells with this antibody-linker molecule and were able to use the dye to watch it enter into the cells and measure how long it was active before it was degraded.