Research Area
Biomedical Device
A biomedical device is a tool used for medical purposes such as diagnosis and therapy. There are numerous biomedical devices to improve human health and welfare by altering pharmacological, metabolic, or immunological functions. To achieve fast, economic, non-invasive, and sensitive biomedical applications like diagnostics, treatment, and drug delivery, development of smaller scale medical device is demanding. We are interested in development and application of micro- or nano-scale biomedical devices such as micro-or nano-needles and various types of micro- or nano-implants.
Drug Delivery
Drug delivery is the modulation of pharmaceutical or biopharmaceutical administration for efficient therapeutic effect. In order to improve the efficacy, safety, and patient compliance of drugs, drug delivery researches have focused on how toreduce toxicity, increase absorption and distribution, and improve release profile. Various routes of delivery including oral, pulmonary, intranasal, intravaginal, and transdermal have been investigated, and we delve into advanced transdermal drug delivery such as targeting drug delivery used for cancer-therapy avoiding side-effect.
Gene Therapy
Genes are the basic molecular units of heredity of a living organism and achieve their functions by directing protein synthesis. Gene therapy is a technique for inserting, altering, or removing genes within cells and tissues. Generally, a normal gene is inserted into the genome to replace a disease-causing gene. The viral vector is considered the most common method for effective gene therapy, but it has safety issues. We are working on non-viral gene therapy including variousphysical methods such as electroporation, micro-or nano-particle carriers, and micro- or nano-needle gene delivery.
Vaccine research
Vaccination is the most effective way to prevent the spread of infectious disease. The recent outbreak of pandemic H1N1 influenza gave us a lesson how vaccines are critical for global health. However, current vaccine production systems and administration methods have several limitations. We focus on two aspects of vaccine research: optimization of recombinant vaccine production by genetic engineering and development of effective vaccine administration methods such as skin vaccination.
Smart Biopolymer
Smart biopolymers have been increasingly used in biomedical applications such as drug delivery systems and tissue engineering. We are focuing on stimuli-responsive systems based on the synthesis of stimuli-responsive biopolymer for specific targeting delivery to various diseased sites such as tumor and diabetes. Now, we are working both on tumor targeting delivery and oral insulin delivery projects based on synthesizing smart biopolymers.
Cell-Penetrating Peptide research
Antimicrobial peptides have been shown to kill microbes with impressive potency and specificity and developed as therapeutic agents for infectious disease treatment. Permeating peptides can also be applied as carriers for delivery of foreign substances into microorganisms. We study the novel application of antimicrobial peptide as a skin permeation enhancer and vaccine adjuvant. The mechanism of permeation enhancement and the adjuvant effects of antimicrobial peptides will be elucidated by various biological assay. In addition, we study the application of permeating peptide as a gene delivery vehicle across the cell barrier.
Cancer Immunotherapy
Cancer Immunotherapy has gained increasing interest in cancer treatment, as direct cancer killing did not provide sufficient advances in survival rate and prognosis. It utilizes adaptive immunity, which is responsible to recognize and eliminate external antigen, to kill and memorize the cancer cells. The goals of immunotherapy include recovering the functionality of patient’s immunity and/or polarizing the immunosuppressive tumor-microenvironment into anti-tumoral one. As the targets of immunotherapy are not only immune cells but also tumor-microenvironment, it provides new chances to various field of research. Exploiting the benefits of our carriers systems or polypeptides, we are trying to develop novel applications of the cancer immunotherapy.