Professor Matthew Hartman

Dr Matthew C. T. Hartman is a Visiting Fellow at Magdalene College.

Dr Matthew C. T. Hartman is a Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and Chief Scientific Officer of Light Switch Bio, a Richmond-based biotech startup. He studied chemistry at Wheaton College, earned his PhD at the University of Michigan, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School with Nobel Laureate Jack W. Szostak. His laboratory works where chemistry meets biology, focusing on two long-standing problems in medicine: how to make cancer drugs act on tumours rather than on the whole body, and how to design medicines for disease targets that conventional drugs cannot reach.

Most chemotherapy drugs travel throughout the body, which is why they so often cause serious side effects. Dr Hartman’s group developed a way to place a light-sensitive "cage" on a drug, keeping it inactive until light is shone on the tumour. The team has developed cages that can be removed with near-infrared light, which can reach tumours several centimetres below the surface. A key result of this work is IR-Platin, a light-activated version of the widely used drug cisplatin. In laboratory and animal studies it has been effective at lower doses than standard cisplatin. This work has led to two patents and to the founding of Light Switch Bio, which aims to develop these light-activated therapies toward the clinic.

The lab’s second area of research addresses proteins inside cells that interact over large, flat surfaces—targets that small-molecule drugs often cannot block. To tackle these, the group builds collections of up to ten trillion ring-shaped peptides ("macrocycles") and screens them to find the few that bind a chosen target. The team has developed ways to make these molecules more stable and able to enter cells, and has expanded the cell’s protein-building "alphabet" beyond its usual 20 amino acids to create macrocycles with novel properties. These tools are being applied to a variety of difficult cancer targets such as KRAS and MycN.

Dr Hartman’s research is supported by the NIH, NSF and other funders, and the lab’s methods have attracted growing interest from the pharmaceutical industry. He takes particular pride in the students and postdoctoral researchers he has trained, several of whom now lead peptide drug-discovery efforts at major pharmaceutical companies. Together with collaborators at VCU and beyond, his group continues to develop chemical tools aimed at safer and more effective treatments for cancer and other diseases.

Research Interest

• Peptide drug discovery
• Development of peptide inhibitors for protein-protein interactions
• In vitro selection of highly modified/macrocyclic peptide libraries via mRNA display
• Genetic code expansion
• Light-enabled drug delivery and photocontrolled activation of therapeutics

Qualifications

• Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL BS 05/1997 Chemistry
• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, Ph.D. 12/2002 Chemistry
• Harvard University/Mass. General Hospital Postdoc 9/2006 Molecular Biology

Career / Research Highlights

• Recipient of the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences Distinguished Scholar Award (2025).
• Recipient of the VCU NIRA Scholar Award (2023, 2026).
• Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award (2013).
• Secured substantial research funding, including major R01 and R35 NIH grants and NSF grants.
• Holds multiple patents on light-enabled drug delivery and near-IR activatable molecules.

Professional Affiliations

• Peptide Drug Hunting Consortium