The primary focus of our laboratory is to better understand the upregulation of the inflammatory process and develop novel therapeutics and mathematical models, as well as targeted drug delivery systems, for treating inflammatory disease. We develop novel “tissue on a chip” microfluidic systems to better understand the inflammatory response, rapidly screen therapeutics, model the blood-brain barrier, and understand the impact of radiation on tissue. We also develop innovative approaches to target drugs, genes, contrast agents, etc. to select tissue via adhesion molecules which are upregulated in the course of the development of the disease (e.g. tumor, myocardial infarction) or treatment (e.g. radiotherapy). We build novel in silico and proteomics models of vascular inflammatory response to provide insight on the role of protein targets in predicting physiological responses under inflammatory and normal conditions and identify druggable targets for developing therapeutics for treating inflammation. Our research is highly interdisciplinary in nature and involves unique collaborative efforts with several academic laboratories and industrial partners.
