My PhD focuses on improving the way pharmaceutical drugs are administered. The most common way to administer a drug is orally, e.g. swallowing a paracetamol tablet. Unfortunately, it isn’t the most efficient way to treat a disease as the drug has to go through someone’s entire digestive system before it reaches the bloodstream and eventually the target site of action (e.g. the organ that’s painful or causing the disease). And on its way, the drug is absorbed by lots of cells and organs that have nothing to do with the illness to be treated, which can cause numerous side effects.
The aim of my PhD is to use polymer microparticles as drug delivery vehicles and use them to provide a targeted treatment. This means that the microparticles containing the drug will only release the drug at a specific target location, at a particular time and for a precise duration, greatly reducing side effects and improving the efficiency of the treatment.
I did my undergraduate degree (equivalent to an MEng here) in Materials Engineering back home in France, and then an MSc in Advanced Materials Engineering at Cranfield University, before starting my PhD. It’s during my MSc thesis in bioengineering where I worked with a PhD student that I decided I wanted to do a PhD; before then I had no idea what a PhD even was! Most of what I do for my PhD has very little to do with my undergraduate degree or MSc, so I had to learn a lot very quickly when I first started but it certainly didn’t discourage me and I’m now pretty proud of the work I’ve done for the past 3.5 years.
I was sure I was going to get a job after my MSc but I just couldn’t really find anything that excited me. Doing my MSc thesis on a project that mixed engineering and medicine was a revelation to me as it combined two fields that I was hugely passionate about but never really thought of combining before. That’s when I started thinking that perhaps I could do a PhD in this area so I would learn more about it and contribute to making people’s lives better.
Honestly, I didn’t know about Loughborough University before starting my PhD. My first criterion was to find a funded PhD that really interested me, the university really wasn’t my priority. It’s only when I got the PhD and started telling my friends that they said I would love Loughborough as it is really big in sports and I’m quite an active person. They were definitely right!