Dr. Paranjape is a Research Instructor in the University of Pittsburgh Heart and Vascular Institute and Vascular Medicine Institute.

Dr Paranjape’s research interest broadly focuses on identifying new ways to enhance drug-delivery in cardiovascular, neurological, and metastatic diseases. During his PhD training, he worked on identifying and characterizing unique, hard to target breast cancer stem cells. He generated in vitro transformed cell lines useful for studying epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and stemness properties, some of the hallmarks of cancer stem cells (Paranjape et al., Oncogene, 2012). Using these cells, he reported a novel mechanism linking Bmi1, Nanog, and NFκB in breast cancer stem cells (Paranjape et al., BMC Cancer, 2014). At MD Anderson Center, he demonstrated that FOXC2, a known EMT regulator, is involved in stem cell regulation in human prostate cancer cells (Paranjape et al., Oncogene, 2016). He showed that inhibition of p38 MAPK pathway using a chemical inhibitor reversed the EMT and made the cells more sensitive to AR therapy. Later at NCI, he worked on ‘hard to treat’ breast cancer brain metastases for which no effective therapy exists. That study showed that distinct areas within breast cancer brain metastases with varying permeability for drugs have unique gene expression patterns and identified that astrocytic S1P3 is upregulated as a neuroinflammatory response in highly permeable lesions (Gril and Paranjape et al., Nature communications, 2018).

Currently he is working on establishing technologies to increase drug delivery beyond the endothelial barriers in the heart and brain which have been known as hindrances in treating cardiovascular and neurological diseases. His is exploring the probable bioeffects of new non-invasive technologies such as ultrasound-targeted microbubble cavitation (UTMC) to induce hyperpermeability.