I am very honoured to serve as guest editor of the Journal of Drug Targeting’s Life-time Achievement Award given this year to my friend and colleague Professor Patrick Couvreur. Patrick is currently Professor at the University of Paris-Sud. He also leads the research group ‘Nanomedicines for the treatment of severe diseases’ at the Institut Galien Paris-Sud. I first met Patrick in 1986 in Châtenay-Malabry when I joined his research team as a graduate student and since 1992, I have been privileged to be in daily contact with him. Here I can testify to his imaginative and visionary spirit, as well as his ability to move forward in science with great intellectual honesty and tremendous scientific courage.
Patrick Couvreur has a degree in Pharmacy from the Catholic University of Louvain, in Brussels (Belgium). In 1975, he defended his thesis at the same university on the subject of the influence of starch on tablet disintegration, under the supervision of Prof. Michel Roland. In 1976, he joined Prof. Peter Speiser's group at the ETH in Zurich (Switzerland) where he remained for 2 years as a post-doctoral researcher. He then returned to Brussels where he discovered the lysosomotropic effects of nanoparticles. Shortly after this, he produced the first rapidly biodegradable nanoparticles made of poly (alkyl cyanoacrylate). Initial applications of these nanoparticles started in Brussels and dealt with the delivery of anticancer drugs. In 1984, Patrick Couvreur was appointed full professor at the School of Pharmacy at the University Paris-Sud in Châtenay-Malabry (France) and joined the group created by Professor Francis Puisieux. This was the start of an exciting adventure for him which still continues. Patrick was convinced that the new formulation he discovered could overcome many barriers for drug delivery, and very successfully, he applied the concept of drug targeting to conventional drugs (mainly antibiotics and anticancer drugs) as well as macromolecules such as peptides and nucleic acids.
In recent years, Patrick Couvreur identified technological barriers for further clinical applications of polymer nanoparticles among which (i) the low encapsulation capacity of nanoparticulate systems, (ii) the rapid release of the encapsulated drug, (iii) the difficulty of obtaining synthetic materials which are biodegradable, neither toxic nor immunogenic, and do not accumulate in tissues and cells. These considerations led to a new concept known as ‘squalenization’ corresponding to the transformation of squalene drug conjugates into nanoparticles, opening new perspectives in the treatment of severe diseases and particularly interesting for the delivery of adenosine and gemcitabine.
Patrick Couvreur’s professional profile is exemplary. His research activities are largely multidisciplinary, covering the domains of pharmacology, polymer synthesis, physical chemistry of materials, nanotechnology, and pharmaceutical engineering. He counts among those rare pharmaceutical scientists whose research has led to the creation of two start-up companies (Bioalliance and Medsqual) and to the clinically advanced development of a nanoparticulate drug delivery system (under clinical phase III for the treatment of drug resistant hepatocarcinoma). For these reasons, the famous French newspaper ‘le Monde’ once portrayed Patrick as a ‘serial bio-entrepreneur’.
It has been a great pleasure for me to count among Patrick Couvreur’s friends and colleagues. Together, for over 30 years, we have seen the field of nanoparticles evolving to nanomedicines and moving from basic science to clinical applications. Patrick currently holds memberships in several academies all over the world but his admission to the French Academy of Science is a strong recognition that pharmaceutical technology has become an important and independent research field. It is also the acknowledgment of all his efforts to dig deeper into complex and multidisciplinary approaches attracting high-level scientists to collaborate with him.
The authors who have agreed to contribute to this special issue count among Patrick’s friends and colleagues from different continents. In one way or another they have interacted with Patrick either as colleagues, scientific partners or previous post-doctoral fellows or PhDs. I believe their contribution is a fitting tribute to all the friendships that Patrick has struck up among different generations over the years.