Dr Md Reduanul Hossain

Dr Md Reduanul Hossain is an Early Career Researcher within the Global Centre for Gynaecological Diseases in the School of Biomedical Science and Pharmacy.

Dr Hossain has completed his PhD in Reproductive Medicine at the University of Newcastle, Australia, under the supervision of Distinguished Laureate Professor Roger Smith and Dr Jonathan Paul. His thesis was focused on preventing Preterm Birth, which is a birth before 37 completed weeks of gestation and leads to serious health complications for newborn babies. During his PhD, Dr Hossain conducted a project to develop therapeutic interventions to safely and effectively prevent preterm birth. Specifically, he worked on the ongoing development of a uterine-targeted drug delivery system, which has been devised as a novel strategy for the prevention of preterm birth while simultaneously improving the safety of the therapeutic intervention for both the pregnant mother and unborn baby. In this role, he conceived, designed, and conducted scientific studies to optimise this novel nanomedicine platform for use in the clinic. For example, using biopsies of pregnant human uterine tissue, he conducted rigorous analyses of both established and newly available contraction-blocking drugs (tocolytics) to identify drugs that, when administered in specific combinations, produce a synergistic effect that is better than the sum of the effects of the individual drugs. This is a significant advance for the field as achieving synergism means the desired therapeutic effect of blocking premature uterine contractions can be achieved with reduced qualities of drugs. This translates into improved blocking of contractions with improved safety for the patients. Dr Hossain identified 8 novel drug combinations that achieve synergistic effects against the inhibition of pregnant human uterine contractions. Now, he is working (as a Research Assistant) toward encapsulating these novel synergistic drug combinations into the nanoparticle-based uterine-targeted drug delivery system. Once this is achieved, it will constitute the most advanced preterm birth prevention strategy and represent a giant leap forward for the field.