Many serious medical conditions still lack effective treatments, leaving many patients with few options. Brain cancer therapies often fail because patients are too weak for surgery, tumors are inoperable, or the drugs cause harsh side effects like pain, nausea, and fatigue. Similarly, epilepsy affects 0.5%–1% of the population, yet 30% of patients remain unresponsive to systemic treatments. The challenge is rarely the availability of promising drugs, but rather the ability to deliver them with precision in both time and space while minimizing harm to the patient.
Mission: Precision Without Compromise
Shifting from whole-body treatments to targeted local therapies can lower doses, enhance effectiveness, and reduce side effects. Advanced drug delivery implants represent a highly precise approach for such targeted therapy, which has recently achieved great scientific progress. However, as these techniques advance from applied physics labs into preclinical studies and clinical applications, new scientific challenges emerge. What interactions between the device, the drug, and the surrounding biological environment are crucial for optimizing dosing?
Research at the Intersection of Physics and Medicine
Addressing these challenges requires a multidisciplinary approach that integrates device physics, biophysics, and pharmacology. This project combines high-precision experimental data with computational models to establish fundamental insights into local drug diffusion, distribution, and therapeutic effects.
- Electrically Controlled Release: Electrophoretic delivery devices use a small, controlled electric field to achieve the localized release of charged drug molecules with precise timing. Delivery rates and release dynamics are finely tuned by adjusting electrical parameters. Real-time imaging and sensing techniques with high resolution enables investigation of precision in delivery rates, and how drugs distribute at the microscale, across the device-tissue interface.
- Predictive Modeling for Smarter Therapy: Developing computational frameworks that focus on both temporal and spatial resolution to optimize drug dosing, ensuring efficacy while minimizing side effects. Advancing these models not only improves dosing precision but also reduces reliance on animal models in preclinical research.
- From the Physics Lab to Preclinical Sciences: Collaborating with research groups worldwide, this project focuses on validating drug delivery systems across various preclinical models, from bioengineered 3D cultures to in vivo studies.
The research is funded by Zenith, a career development program for innovative young research leaders. Additional funding comes from Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and the European Innovation Council.
