Improving drug delivery is an opportunity to address unmet medical needs. 

PRISM is focused on identifying functional disease targets as a means to overcome poor drug delivery that is a major problem for treating many diseases and is a key challenge to achieving the goals of precision medicine.  

Many drugs fail in the clinic simply due to inadequate delivery to the disease site where they can be most effective.  Directly targeting diseased sites could significantly lower therapeutic doses, avoid toxicity and deliver drugs to the most appropriate cellular microenvironment.

By combining proteomics, bioinformatics and advanced in vivo imaging technologies, scientists at PRISM can interrogate tissues in their native environment to rapidly identify and validate new disease targets and biomarkers. Unmasking additional therapeutic targets will form the basis for the continued development of novel drug delivery strategies.  Efforts are currently focused on the pre-clinical development of these targeting strategies to overcome current issues associated with poor drug delivery.

PRISM's unique strategy requires the integration and synergistic interaction of a multi-disciplinary scientific team with expertise in the fields of immunology, chemistry, clinical medicine, molecular and cellular biology, proteomics, nanotechnology and imaging science.

PRISM scientists pioneered a drug delivery platform that usurps cell trafficking pathways to pump injected agents and therapies directly into organs and tumors.  Based on a transvascular transport mechanism mediated via vesicular transporters called caveolae, targeting proteins enriched in these transporters provide a pathway across the vascular endothelium that lines blood vessels.  

The development of a proprietary human intravital microscopy model facilitates dynamic, continuous and direct imaging of the transvascular pumping system. Live monitoring of injected caveolae-targeted therapeutic agents is enabled using these advanced pre-clinical models and will help drive new therapies into the clinic.