Frontiers in Disease TherapiesUCSB’s integration of critical aspects of biological engineering (drug delivery, systems biology, biomaterials and detection/diagnostics) and its basic research in diseases has made its preclinical and clinical efforts often more multidisciplinary and innovative.
Among the many diseases that UCSB has cross-disciplinary efforts in, including cancer, diabetes, PTSD, Alzheimer’s, autism, and cardiovascular disease, our efforts in cancer detection and therapy give insight into what makes our approach so unique. By using novel engineering techniques to differentiate key targets and homing peptides for cancers versus normal cells, UCSB researchers have been successful in specifically targeting therapeutics to cancer cells while sparing healthy ones. In cancer and diabetes, another failure of standard approaches to treatment is the optimization of a drug dose regimen. Such complex diseases pose particular challenges because of their complexity, with multiple feedforward and feedback loops, and interactions at many levels. With a strength of UCSB being the understanding of controls, dynamical systems and computation, researchers at UCSB have been successful in attaining 100% controllable glucose levels in type I diabetic patients using closed-loop devices in clinical trials.
For more insight into our approach to disease therapy look at the following researcher links: