Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence Focused on Therapy Response

2009 Annual CCNE-TR Symposium

Andrew Ellington, Ph.D.
Professor, Chemistry and BioChemistry
University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Ellington is the Wilson M. and Kathryn Fraser Research Professor in Biochemistry, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, College of Natural Sciences at UT. He received his B.S. in Biochemistry from Michigan State University in 1981, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard in 1988. As a graduate student he worked with Dr. Steve Benner on the evolutionary optimization of dehydrogenase isozymes. His post-doctoral work was with Dr. Jack Szostak at Massachusetts General Hospital, where his lab developed methods for the in vitro selection of functional nucleic acids and coined the term ‘aptamer.' Dr. Ellington began his academic career as an assistant professor of Chemistry at Indiana University in 1992, continued to develop selection methods. In 1998 he moved to the University of Texas at Austin and is now the Fraser Professor of Biochemistry. Dr. Ellington's lab continues to develop functional nucleic acids for practical applications, including aptamer biosensors, allosteric ribozyme logic gates (aptazymes), and internalizing nucleic acids that can deliver siRNAs to cells. A next leap forward will hopefully be to develop synthetic genetic circuits that can perform amorphous computations. Ultimately, though, Dr. Ellington's first love remains origins of life research, which oddly melds with translational research initiatives in that it is the ultimate biotechnology challenge.

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