Nathan J. Alves, PhD

Bio

Dr. Nathan J. Alves received his PhD in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Notre Dame.  Following graduate school, he completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the IU School of Medicine, where he began his work on the pharmaceutical delivery of clot-digesting enzymes utilizing a nanoparticle-based delivery system. He then spent two years at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in DC on a National Academy of Science Research Associateship. Currently, Dr. Alves is the Director of Translational Research and an Associate Professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) in the Department of Emergency Medicine with a joint appointment at Purdue University in Biomedical Engineering.  The research he conducts, while spanning many disciplines, is centered on the development of translational technologies, treatments, and techniques that can be utilized to have a positive impact on people’s lives.  He has extensive experience in: nanoparticle drug delivery, packaging of pharmaceutical agents/enzymes to treat various diseases, studying the effect that microplastic exposure has on coagulation and fibrinolysis, site-specific antibody modification, oriented antibody immobilization for advanced diagnostics, and extracellular vesicles (EV).  His multidisciplinary background affords him a unique perspective to tackle complex therapeutic and medical device development problems. 

Key Publications

1. Zeng Z., Christodoulides A., Alves N. J. (2023). Real-time Tracking of Fibrinolysis Under Constant Wall Shear and Various Pulsatile Flows in an in-vitro Thrombolysis Model. Bioengineering & Translational Medicine, e10511, doi:10.1002/btm2.10511.
2. Nallan Chakravarthula T., Zeng Z., Alves N. J. (2022). Multivalent Benzamidine Molecules for Plasmin Inhibition: Effect of Valency and Linker Length. ChemMedChem, 17(22), e202200364.
3. Zeng Z., Chakravarthula T. N., Muralidharan C., Hall A., Linnemann A. K., Alves, N. J. (2021). A Unique Fluorescently Labeled Annular Clot Lysis Assay for Diagnostic and Drug Development Applications. Royal Society of Chemistry: Journal of Materials Chemistry B, 9(45), 9295-9307.~featured on cover.
4. Lett Z., Hall A., Skidmore S., Alves N. J. (2021). Environmental Microplastic and Nanoplastic: Exposure Routes and Effects on Coagulation and the Cardiovascular System. Environmental Pollution, 291, 118190.
5. Alves, N. J., Turner, K. B., Daniele, M. A., Oh, E., Medintz, I. L., & Walper, S. A. (2015). Bacterial Nanobioreactors-Directing Enzyme Packaging into Bacterial Outer Membrane Vesicles. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 7(44), 24963-24972.
6. Alves N. J., Mustafaoglu N., Bilgicer B. (2013). Oriented antibody immobilization by site-specific UV photocrosslinking of biotin at the conserved nucleotide binding site for enhanced antigen detection. Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 49, 387-393.
7. Paraskar A.S., Son, S., Chin K.T., Chaudhuri P., Muto K.W., Berkowitz J., Handlogten M.W., Alves N.J., Bilgicer B., Dinulescu D.M., Mashelkar R.A. (2010). Harnessing structure-activity relationship to engineer a cisplatin nanoparticle for enhanced antitumor efficacy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(28), pp.12435-12440.