Jindřich Henry Kopeček, Ph.D., D.Sc., Founder, Chief Scientific Officer and Inventor, Board Member


Henry Kopeček is Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Utah. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering (2011), and elected fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors (2018). He is Honorary Professor of the Sichuan University, China and received a honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki, Finland. Kopeček’s research interests are focused on biorecognition of macromolecules, bioconjugate chemistry, drug delivery systems, and self-assembled biomaterials. Hydrogels from his laboratory have been in clinical use and polymer-anticancer drug conjugates in clinical trials. Kopeček’s Hirsch index is 100; his publications have been cited 34,546 times (Google Scholar 04/26/2021).


Dr. Kopeček’s has an established and impressive record of overall research productivity. He has been working on the design, synthesis, and characterization of hydrogels for clinical applications and his synthetic work resulted in the first publication on stimuli-sensitive hydrogels, with this work ultimately resulting in clinical applications of hydrogels for plastic surgery.


His laboratory developed the area of soluble polymeric drug delivery systems. Together with his coworkers, he formulated and implemented a comprehensive approach to the problems of designing macromolecular conjugates to modulate the pharmacokinetics and tissue localization of therapeutic agents. He has made significant contributions to the science of controlled release including: 1) the development of polymers and copolymers of N-(2-hydroxypropyl) methacrylamide (HPMA) as drug carriers, 2) the introduction of enzymatically degradable derivatives of these polymers, 3) fundamental studies of the rates of enzymatic degradation of oligopeptide side-chains in polymers, 4)determination of the relationship between polymer structure and rates of endocytic uptake of those polymers into cells, 5) design and preparation of polymers capable of specific intralysosomal release of chemically bound therapeutic agents, and 6)fundamental studies of tissue localization of polymeric carriers bearing ligands for receptors expressed on the surfaces of specific target cells. HPMA copolymer-drug conjugates have been evaluated in clinical trials.


When polymer-drug conjugates faced the hurdle of incongruity between animal and human data on the treatment of solid tumors, Prof. Kopeček and his coworkers rose to meet the challenge, undertaking intensive research efforts to address the major factors for translation into clinical application. They designed backbone degradable HPMA copolymer carriers that possess long intravascular half-life and, consequently, enhanced efficacy in tumor treatment. Furthermore, these new conjugates combined with multivalent HPMA copolymer peptide anti-PD-L1 antagonists (MPPAs) established the polymer-facilitated tumor targeting of immunogenic drugs and surface crosslinking of PD-L1 receptors as a potential new therapeutic strategy to propagate a long-term antitumor immunity, which will broaden the application of immunotherapy to immunosuppressive cancers.


Kopeček’s laboratory also designed a new paradigm of nanomedicines, called drug-free macromolecular therapeutics. Using polymer carriers bearing multiple ligands for crosslinking and clustering receptors expressed on the surface of specific target cells apoptosis is induced without the participation of low molecular weight drugs.