COMMENT pubs.acs.org/bc
Remembering Professor Tae Gwan Park (1957 2011) Haeshin Lee, Ph.D.* Department of Chemistry, The Graduate School of Nanoscience and Technology, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), Republic of Korea
Ji Hoon Jeong, Ph.D. School of Pharmacy, Sungkyunkwan University, Republic of Korea
Allan S. Hoffman, Sc.D. Emeritus Professor, Bioengineering Department, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States
Professor Tae Gwan Park (1957 2011) was an outstanding, innovative biomaterial scientist, and was highly admired and respected around the world. He was personally a warm-hearted, exceptionally honest, and modest person. His profound intellectual curiosity and his strong desire for excellence in research inspired many of his colleagues, his students, and his postdocs. He will be deeply missed by many people around the world. Dr. Park obtained his B.S. degree from Department Chemical Technology at Seoul National University in 1980 and got his Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1990 (under Professor Allan Hoffman). His dissertation involved groundbreaking, seminal research on the immobilization of drugs, enzymes, and cells within “smart” hydrogels.1,2 He showed how enzymes and cells in such hydrogels could be turned on and off by cyclic changes in temperature. In addition, Dr. Park revealed how a packed bed enzymehydrogel system could convert substrate to product with increased efficiency due to enhanced mass transport of substrate in and product out. He also developed a temperature gradient column of smart hydrogel beads as a molecular size separation chromatographic system. After receiving his Ph.D., Dr. Park did postdoctoral work on PLGA drug delivery systems at MIT, under Professor Bob Langer. Following that, he began his professional academic carrier as an Assistant Professor at Temple University, School of Pharmacy (1992 1995). In 1996, he joined the Department of Biological Sciences at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) where he remained until his death. r 2011 American Chemical Society
Dr. Park published 252 peer-reviewed papers spanning many areas involving polymer chemistry, nanotechnology, and bioconjugation chemistry. His research interests were in three areas: (1) delivery of proteins, peptides, and nucleic acid-based drugs such as siRNA, (2) tissue engineering, and (3) intelligent or “smart” polymers and hydrogels. At KAIST, he developed novel methods for preparation of biodegradable porous scaffolds for tissue engineering, utilizing gas forming reagents3 and thermally induced phase separation to form the pores.4 He also dedicated himself to the development of polymeric micelles for anticancer drug delivery,5 microspheres for peptide/protein delivery,6 protein PEGylation techniques,7 and nonviral gene delivery systems.8 10 His recent research interests included PEG-assisted solubilization of DNA in organic solvents (cover article Bioconjugate Chemistry11), molecular imaging,12 14 and musselinspired tissue adhesives15 Dr. Park received a number of awards, including the Clemson award (2009) from the Society for Biomaterials. The Korean Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology selected him as one of six of the most highly cited Korean scientists for the past ten years (Creative Knowledge Award, 2009). He was invited to speak at many international meetings. The impact that Dr. Park had as a world-class scientist, an outstanding mentor, and one of the pioneers of biotechnology in Korea was significant around the world. We are saddened from his death and will miss him greatly.
’ AUTHOR INFORMATION Corresponding Author
*Haeshin Lee, Ph.D. E-mail:
[email protected].
’ REFERENCES (1) Park, T. G., and Hoffman, A. S. (1988) Effect of temperature cycling on the activity and productivity of immobilized β-galactosidase in a thermally reversible hydrogel bead reactor. Appl. Biochem. Biotechnol. 19, 1–9.
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(2) Park, T. G., and Hoffman, A. S. (1994) Estimation of temperaturedependent pore sizes in poly(NIPAAm) hydrogel beads. Biotechnol. Prog. 10, 82–86. (3) Nam, Y. S., Yoon, J. J., and Park, T. G. (2000) A novel fabrication method for macroporous scaffolds using gas foaming salt as porogen additive. J. Biomed. Mater. Res. 53, 1–7. (4) Nam, Y. S., and Park, T. G. (1999) Porous biodegradable polymeric scaffolds prepared by thermally induced phase separation method. Biomaterials 47, 8–17. (5) Yoo, H. S., and Park., T. G. (2001) Biodegradable polymeric micelles composed of doxorubicin conjugated PLGA-PEG block copolymer. J. Controlled Release 70, 63–70. (6) Kim, H. K., Chung, H. J., and Park., T. G. (2006) Biodegradable polymeric microspheres with “open/close” pores for sustained release of human growth hormone. J. Controlled Release 112, 167–174. (7) Lee, H., and Park, T. G. (2002) Preparation and characterization of mono-PEGylated epidermal growth factor: Evaluation of in vitro biologic activity. Pharm. Res. 19, 845–851. (8) Park, T. G., Jeong, J. H., and Kim, S. W. (2006) Current status of polymeric gene delivery systems. Adv. Drug Delivery Rev. 58, 467–486. (9) Kim, S. H., Jeong, J. H., Lee, S. H., Kim, S. W., and Park, T. G. (2006) PEG conjugated VEGF siRNA for anti-angiogenic gene therapy. J. Controlled Release 116, 123–129. (10) Mok, H., Lee, S. H., Park, J. W., and Park, T. G. (2010) Multimeric small interfering ribonucleic acid for highly efficient sequencespecific gene silencing. Nat. Mater. 9, 272–278. (11) Mok, H., and Park, T. G. (2006) PEG-assisted DNA solubilization in organic solvents for preparing cytosol specifically degradable PEG/DNA nanogels. Bioconjugate Chem. 17, 1369–1372. (12) Lee, Y., Lee, H., Kim, Y. B., Hyeon, T., Park, H., Messersmith, P. B., and Park, T. G. (2008) Bioinspired surface immobilization of hyaluronic acid on monodisperse magnetite nanocrystals for targeted cancer imaging. Adv. Mater. 20, 4154–4157. (13) Lee, H., Lee, K., Lee, I. K., and Park, T. G. (2009) Gold nanoprobe sensitive to intracellular reactive oxygen species. Adv. Funct. Mater. 19, 1884–1890. (14) Bae, K. H., Kim, Y. B., Lee, Y., Hwang, J. Y., Park, H. W., and Park, T. G. (2010) Bio-inspired synthesis and characterization of gadolinium-labeled magnetite nanoparticles for dual contrast T1- and T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. Bioconjugate Chem. 21, 505–512. (15) Lee, Y., Chung, H. J., Yeo, S., Ahn, C.-H., Lee, H., Messersmith, P. B., and Park, T. G. (2010) Thermo-sensitive, injectable, and tissue adhesive sol-gel transition hyaluronic acid/pluronic composite hydrogels prepared from bio-inspired catechol-thiol reaction. Soft Matter 6, 977–983.
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