Drug delivery research typically asks: how do we get a therapeutic to the right organ? We ask a different question: what happens to it when it arrives?
The environments where inhaled drugs must act — airway mucus, microbial biofilms, necrotic granulomas — are not passive backgrounds. They are spatially structured energy landscapes, built from charge fields, polymer meshes, and hydrophobic domains, that actively sort, trap, and redistribute molecules based on their physicochemical identity. A drug entering these environments doesn’t simply diffuse to its target. It is adsorbed into wells, excluded by barriers, and channeled along paths of least resistance — and the topology of that landscape, not the deposited dose, determines whether the drug works.
This insight organizes everything we do. Our lab develops the physical theory, the measurement platforms, and the engineered interventions needed to understand and exploit drug–barrier interactions in complex biological systems.
How We Think: Three Layers
Our research is built on a conviction: the same underlying physics governs outcomes across seemingly different problems. A molecule navigating a mucin gel, a drug pair traversing an infected airway, and an antibiotic penetrating a biofilm are all instances of the same problem — a perturbation propagating through a structured medium, where the outcome depends on the competition between the timescale of the perturbation and the timescales of the medium’s response.
We organize our work in three layers:
The laws. We identify the physical principles — timescale competitions, energy landscape topology, influence reach — that determine outcomes independent of any particular system. When two antibiotics must arrive at a bacterial membrane within the same time window to achieve synergy, the governing physics is a timescale competition: does the co-exposure window persist long enough for the combined mechanism to act? When a cationic drug enters a polyanionic mucin gel, the governing physics is landscape navigation: the electrostatic field sorts it into wells and channels that determine how far it penetrates. These principles are not analogies. They are shared mathematics.
The measurements. Universal laws are only useful if we can measure the parameters they require — at the spatial and temporal scale where heterogeneity governs outcomes. Bulk rheology averages over the very structure that determines transport. Standard checkerboard synergy assays strip away the environmental complexity that governs whether synergy survives in vivo. We build experimental platforms that preserve biological complexity while resolving the physics at the scale where it matters.
The interventions. When you understand the landscape and the timescale competitions, intervention becomes landscape engineering: reshape wells, lower barriers, open channels, bias timescale ratios. We don’t simply optimize dose. We design formulations, particles, and molecular strategies that deliberately reshape the physical environment to favor the therapeutic outcome.
The Barrier Problem
Biological environments as structured energy landscapes
Every barrier we study — mucus, biofilm matrix, caseous tissue — is a spatially heterogeneous energy landscape whose topology determines what gets through. These landscapes are not static; whether a drug experiences a time-averaged landscape or gets trapped depends on how fast the network rearranges relative to how fast the drug moves. We are working to resolve this spatial structure at the scale of transport.
Designing Around the Barrier
Cross-domain formulation engineering
Every material choice in a drug delivery system propagates consequences across multiple physical domains simultaneously. We map the full consequence space of each choice — from manufacturing through biological fate — and look for regions of design space where multiple domains are simultaneously satisfied. This produces formulations that conventional sequential optimization would never find.
Measuring What Matters
Instruments and models at the governing scale
Standard pharmacological assays are designed for convenience, not fidelity. We build experimental systems that preserve biological complexity — physiologically informed antimicrobial platforms, non-contact mechanical characterization of living mucosal cultures, and distribution-level metrics that capture information conventional summary statistics discard. The commitment: measure at the scale where the physics operates.
Therapeutic Programs
Reshaping landscapes to bias outcomes
Our fundamental work drives specific therapeutic programs, each organized around the same intervention logic: identify the timescale competition or landscape feature that governs the outcome, then intervene to bias it. We work across chronic respiratory infections, mucus barrier modulation, inhaled biologics, and new metrics for inhaled product performance.