RNDr. Tomáš Etrych, PhD., DSc.

Research Professor Tomáš Etrych is the Head of the department of Biomedical polymers and head of the Centre of Biomacromolecular and Bioanalogous Systems at the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences since 2015. He received his PhD degree from Faculty of Science of Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic in 2002 and later on he received DSc degree from the same faculty in 2017. He is also head of the research program „Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering“ of the BIOCEV center, Biotechnology and Biomedicine Centre of the Academy of Sciences and Charles University, in Vestec.  He has published more than 175 peer-reviewed papers with 5700 citations; current h-index 43 (Scopus September 2021).

His research interest was focused on design, synthesis and characterization of polymers for biomedical applications. Particularly on controlled synthesis using RAFT polymerization of water-soluble and self- assembling micellar polymer carriers for drug delivery and controlled release of active substances within the treatment of neoplastic, microbial and inflammatory diseases. Also, tailored polymer carrier systems for covalent conjugation with bioactive proteins, oligopeptides intended for drug targeting were studied. He was also involved in the designing systems for the photodynamic therapy including up-converting nanoparticles and porphyrin-based molecules. Beside the drug delivery purposes his research scope was also oriented on design and synthesis of dye-labelled polymer carriers suitable for tumor diagnostics during the therapy or for the fluorescence- guided tumor surgery. His research was also based on synthetic polymer vaccines leading to publication in Nature Biotechnology.

His team cooperates with a high number of laboratories abroad (France, Japan, USA, Germany, Spain, Austria, etc.) and in the Czech Republic within the field of nanotherapeutics and diagnostics.