Research

About PerMIT

The PerMIT laboratory focuses on personalized and image-guided drug and gene delivery, with a goal of treating cancer and neurological disease through the selective delivery of novel therapies. We address these challenges through the design of imaging devices, ‘omic based analysis of tissues, and molecularly-targeted imaging probes and engineered delivery vehicles.


PerMIT US

Newly developed ultrasound imaging devices include a volumetric breast ultrasound system capable of imaging the breast in a few seconds, dedicated liver and pediatric transducer arrays, and methods for ultrasound enhanced delivery of drugs and genes in the context of cancer and neurological disease. Novel therapeutic strategies controlled by ultrasound allow for selective delivery to the brain and ultrasonic control of a cassette of T cell cytokines.

PerMIT PET

The laboratory has also advanced the use of positron emission tomography (PET) imaging to track vehicles and quantify changes in gene expression. Through non-invasive methods, the PerMIT lab has tracked sustained therapeutic changes in gene expression in the brain over more than one year. Finally, the PerMIT lab has developed methods to combine spatial proteomics and transcriptomics to identify the molecular receptors that can be targeted to treat cancer and engineered ligands to these targets with a goal of near-term translation of novel therapies.

A few notable accomplishments (2020-2023)

  1. Engineered a system for real-time ultrasound tomography (Science Advances doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adg8176)
  2. Identified targets through ‘omics and engineered a treatment for pancreatic cancer (BioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2024.01.07.574209, Biomaterials doi: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2023)
  3. Demonstrated sustained therapeutic transduction after systemic injection of delivery vehicles (Nature Communications doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-15818-4, Nature Methods doi: 10.1038/s41592-023-01896-x, Biomaterials doi: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2022.121701)
  4. Demonstrated transfection of T cells based on systemic injection of targeted lipid nanoparticles for the treatment of cancer (Biomaterials doi: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2021.121339)
  5. Engineered a method to control T cell cytokine production with ultrasound (Nature Communications doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-42249-8)