Mitragotri Group Research

Drug delivery is the science and engineering of converting potent biomolecules into practical medical therapies. Delivering medicines to patients in a safe, effective and compliant way is a major challenge in today’s health care. Simple pills and injections comprise the most commonly used modalities for administering drugs. Pills are generally accepted as a convenient mode of drug delivery; however, their use is limited to small molecules. Macromolecular drugs such as peptides and proteins cannot be taken orally and have to be administered via injections. Furthermore, many drugs, regardless of their mode of administration, need to localize in specific diseased tissues and systemic administration of these drugs to healthy tissues can be toxic. The ability of drugs to reach from the point of administration, via pills or injections, to target tissue is limited by multiple barriers in the body. These include enzymatic degradation in the stomach, absorption across intestinal epithelium, hepatic clearance and accumulation in non-targeted tissues. These barriers exist at multiple length and time scales ranging from those at the tissue-level to organelle-level. These barriers protect various tissues, cells, and organelles from their environment. While the existence of these barriers is essential to life, they limit our ability to deliver drugs for therapeutic applications. Accordingly, the primary challenge in the field of drug delivery lies in understanding these barriers and developing novel strategies to overcome them in order to cargo drugs and their carriers to their destination without compromising safety. That is the challenge that we have undertaken!

Examples of specific projects in our laboratory are highlighted below.