Prestigious Best Paper award to iNANO researcher

Associate Professor Ken Howard has received the award for best paper of in the Journal of Controlled Release awarded by the Controlled Release Society and Elsevier.

Associate Professor Ken Howard receives this year’s award for the best paper in the Journal of Controlled Release. (Photo: Maria Randima, AU Photo)
Associate Professor Ken Howard receives this year’s award for the best paper in the Journal of Controlled Release. (Photo: Maria Randima, AU Photo)

The Controlled Release Society (CRS) is the global society for drug delivery science and technologies and every year the CRS honors those who have made a major contribution to the society and the field.

One such award is the Jorge Heller Journal of Controlled Release Outstanding Paper Award for the best paper in the Journal of Controlled Release, selected by a committee at CRS and the editors of the Journal of Controlled Release.

This is awarded to the lead author of an outstanding original paper published in Journal of Controlled Release related specifically to the field of delivery and bioactives (not an invited, a review, or from a special meeting). The article will have been published the previous year in the Journal of Controlled Release. 

Congratulations to Ken Howard and the rest of the research team

This year’s winner is Associate Professor Kenneth Howard who receives the award for the paper, first-authored by Ph.D. Maja Thim Larsen from Howard’s research group, and published in 2020.

Read the award-winning paper in Journal of Controlled Release:
FcRn overexpression in human cancer drives albumin recycling and cell growth; a mechanistic basis for exploitation in targeted albumin-drug designs” by Maja Thim Larsen, Ole A. Mandrup, Karen Kræmmer Schelde, Yonglun Luobc, Karina Dalsgaard, Sørensen, Frederik Dagnæs-Hansen, Jason Camerone, Magnus Stougaard, Torben Steiniche, and Kenneth A.Howard. 

Read the official announcement of the winner of this year’s Journal of Controlled Release Best Paper Award 2021.

Ken Howard is heading the Bioengineered Drug Designs Laboratory at iNANO focusing on, protein engineered solutions to the delivery requirements of biomacromolecules with albumin the predominant drug delivery platform.

READ ALSO: Albumin solution to an unmet need in cancer immunotherapy


Collaborators and funding

The research published in the paper was carried out by researchers from Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO), the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Department of Biomedicine, Department of Molecular Medicine, and Department of Clinical Medicine (Aarhus University), Lars Bolund Institute of Regenerative Medicine (China), Albumedix (UK).

The work was financially supported by Innovation Fund Denmark and the Novo Nordisk Foundation (CEMBID, Center for Multifunctional Biomolecular Drug Design).


For further information, please contact

Associate Professor Ken Howard
Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO)
Aarhus University
Email: kenh@inano.au.dk