Over the course of nearly five decades, Phil Low built a scientific career of extraordinary range and impact. Among the ideas that would come to define his work was one that sounded almost too elegant to be true: that the fundamental chemistry of cancer cells could be turned against them, exploited to find and destroy tumors with a precision that conventional medicine could not approach.
it was an idea that proved worth a lifetime.
That conviction reshaped cancer drug discovery at Purdue University and gave rise to therapies and imaging technologies now improving and extending the lives of patients around the world.
Low, who served as a longtime member of the Purdue Institute for Cancer Research (PICR), Purdue’s Presidential Scholar for Drug Discovery, and the Ralph C. Corley Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, died March 4, 2026, at the age of 78. His career produced landmark advances in targeted drug delivery, yielded multiple FDA-approved cancer imaging agents and drugs, and helped establish Purdue as a destination for scientists serious about translating fundamental discovery into medicine that reaches patients.
The clearest measure of that impact is visible in three FDA-approved innovations built on discoveries from Low’s laboratory. These include imaging agent Cytalux® and the prostate cancer diagnostic and treatment pair Locametz® and Pluvicto®. The development of this theranostic pair represents proof-of-concept for the central ambition of Low’s career. He sought to design molecules that seek out and target cancer cells with exacting specificity, deliver their attached payload directly to cancer cells, leaving healthy tissue intact.
Cancer’s own appetite
That concept was born from an observation that had nothing to do with cancer. Low discovered that certain molecules could function as carriers, ferrying attached compounds into cells by binding to specific cellular receptors. The finding raised a question that would define decades of his work. Could that same mechanism be turned into a targeting system for cancer drugs?
The answer came through folate, a vitamin that many cancer cells consume voraciously. By attaching drugs, imaging agents and other therapeutic molecules to folate, Low and his collaborators demonstrated that treatments could accumulate selectively in tumors while largely bypassing healthy tissue. The simplicity of it was almost disarming. They had borrowed the cancer cell’s own appetite and turned it into a delivery mechanism for the thing that would destroy it.
Cytalux emerged from that foundation. Administered before surgery, the drug causes tumors to fluoresce under near-infrared light, allowing surgeons to distinguish malignant tissue from healthy cells and detect lesions that might otherwise go undetected. The technology is now used during surgery for ovarian cancer and lung cancer, helping physicians locate malignant tissue and remove tumors more completely.
The same scientific lineage runs through Locametz and Pluvicto. Locametz allows physicians to visualize prostate cancer cells that express prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) through PET imaging, revealing the full extent of disease throughout the body. Pluvicto uses the same molecular targeting system to deliver radiation directly to those cells, destroying tumors while minimizing collateral damage to surrounding tissue. Together the technologies represent a new generation of precision radioligand therapy for advanced prostate cancer.
from folate to FDA
The PICR partnered with Low to perform the first-in-human clinical study that validated the specificity of the PSMA targeting agent for prostate cancer. Then-director Timothy Ratliff held the Investigational New Drug application (IND), and the PICR financed the clinical study in collaboration with Thomas Gardner, professor of urology at Indiana University School of Medicine. The studies demonstrated clearly that the PSMA targeting agent specifically identified prostate cancer, which led Endocyte to initiate a prostate cancer treatment program that resulted in the development of Pluvicto. That trial also gave rise to Boilermaker Health Innovations (BHI), a nonprofit organization established by PICR leadership to advance early-stage Purdue discoveries toward clinical and commercial development.
If the Purdue Institute for Cancer Research exists to show what happens when basic science is given the room to become something more, Low’s career was its most complete answer. Patient, rigorous, and relentlessly translational, his work traced the full arc, from foundational insight to FDA approval, from the laboratory bench to the life-changing treatment of patients around the world.
“Phil had a rare gift for seeing past the immediate experiment and imagining how people might one day be helped by it, and actually getting it done,” said Andrew Mesecar, the Robert W. Miller Director of the Purdue Institute for Cancer Research. “That kind of vision is what separates a good scientist from a transformative one. For nearly fifty years at Purdue, Phil showed us what a scientist of that caliber could achieve.”
“Beyond his own scientific discoveries, Phil was just such a nice, down-to-earth person who was always generous with his valuable time. We will all miss him dearly.”
The distance between discovery and care
The laboratory was only part of Low’s story.
Over the course of his career, Low held more than 100 U.S. patents and was listed on hundreds of additional patent filings worldwide. He founded seven companies to move Purdue discoveries toward clinical use. One of them, Endocyte, was acquired by Novartis in a $2.1 billion transaction that ultimately brought Pluvicto to patients worldwide. At a moment when the distance between a university laboratory and a patient’s treatment is often measured in decades, Low’s entrepreneurial record stood as a sustained argument that it doesn’t have to be.
Many of those discoveries were forged through strong collaborations with Purdue colleagues and the PICR, an environment designed around the simple but demanding premise that cancer’s complexity requires scientists willing to work across disciplinary boundaries. Low’s laboratory became one of the institute’s most persuasive arguments that the premise is correct.
Low also understood that science advances through people, not just ideas. Generations of students, postdoctoral researchers and collaborators passed through his laboratory or worked alongside him, shaped by his conviction that rigorous inquiry and practical impact are not competing values but inseparable ones.
Timothy Ratliff, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Pathobiology and the former director of the Purdue Institute for Cancer Research who led the institute for more than 15 years, worked closely with Low on multiple research efforts and witnessed firsthand how his ideas moved from chemistry to therapy.
“Working alongside Phil, you saw what it meant to pursue science with both imagination and purpose,” Ratliff said. “He believed deeply that the chemistry we studied could become the medicines patients needed. The fact that so many of those ideas are now saving lives is the clearest testament to his brilliance.”
a lifetime of ideas, realized in LIFT
In 2025, Low and his wife, Joan, announced the creation of the Low Institute for Therapeutics (LIFT), a nonprofit designed to accelerate the translation of Purdue discoveries into medicine by supporting the early-stage clinical studies that promising therapies need and that traditional funding mechanisms too often fail to provide. It was, in its way, a culminating expression of something Low had spent his career demonstrating.
“My work has always been driven by the goal of reducing suffering and mortality,” Low said in 2025 when reflecting on the impact of Pluvicto and his overall career. “It’s nice to know that you can leave a footprint on the planet when you leave it, and I think we’ll be able to say that we’ve done that.”
For the scientific community, Purdue and West Lafayette — which Low called home for so long — the legacy he leaves is both specific and instructive: a body of work that changed how cancer is found and fought, and a model for how a researcher of sufficient imagination and persistence can close the distance between discovery and care.
The therapies built on his science are already at work in the world. They will continue to be for years to come.