Title: Control and Monitoring of Cells in Intact Tissues through Noninvasive Neuroengineering
Developing new therapies is difficult. The majority of new therapies require years in development, hundreds of millions of dollars in costs, and the varied expertise of multiple scientists. Despite all this effort, most therapies fail in clinical trials. For example, a typical clinical trial targeting the central nervous system is successful only 8% of the time and takes nearly 9 years to complete. What if we could develop tools that easily gather molecular information from intact tissues, tracking pathogenesis on a molecular scale in living animals or even in patients? What if we could create new therapeutic platforms and drug discovery pipelines applicable to different disorders with only small changes to the approach?
Our laboratory's mission is to address these questions. We strive to make therapeutic development faster, easier, and cheaper. To achieve this goal, we develop new platform technologies to monitor, control, and treat specific cells in intact tissues. Our technologies enabled noninvasive monitoring and control of cells in the brain, including synthetic serum markers that allow for monitoring gene expression in the brain with a simple blood test, and methods of noninvasive control of specific brain regions and cell populations. We apply these technologies to accelerate scientific discovery and therapeutic development, including through a recently initiated clinical trial aiming to uncover gene expression changes in the intact brains of Parkinson's Disease patients.