The questions that drive our work fall into three groups, distinguished by the nature of the medium. Some problems involve drugs encountering an existing structured matrix — mucus, biofilm, necrotic tissue — and the question is how the matrix sorts and traps the drug. Some problems are specific to the respiratory tract, where the airway’s depth-stratified architecture creates clearance physics that have to be designed against. And some problems involve creating a structured medium from scratch — drying a droplet into a particle, precipitating crystals — where the question is how to control the architecture that emerges.
The same physics governs all three. How we think →
Soft Matter Transport Logic
Mucus, biofilm matrix, necrotic tissue, and tumor stroma are not passive volumes that drugs diffuse through. They are sticky, capacity-limited matrices that bind drugs interfacially — and once binding capacity exceeds the dose, the drug is captured rather than free. Penetration depth, breakthrough, and time-to-failure are then set by adsorption physics, not classical diffusion.
Two specific commitments organize the lab’s work here. First, adsorption-limited transport dominates outcomes in matrices where binding is fast and capacity is large — most biological matrices the lab studies. Second, where the dominant interaction is electrostatic, the charge landscape is reprogrammable: introducing agents that locally modify the field can open transport windows or selectively redirect material through barriers that would otherwise exclude it. The barrier still functions; its selectivity is temporarily reshaped.
Projects Spatiotemporal Synergy · Mucus Barrier Modulation
Respiratory Transport Logic
The airway is not a single transport medium. The mucus gel and the periciliary brush are two different compartments with two different clearance physics — minutes for the gel, hours-to-days for the brush. For nearly every nasal protein therapeutic, the productive biology happens at or below the brush, not in the gel. The gel is a transit layer; the cell surface is where engagement happens.
This depth asymmetry reframes the design objective. A formulation that wins on bulk residence while losing on depth-resolved retention at the brush is not winning at all. The lab develops technologies that target the periciliary compartment specifically — using viscoelastic operating-window control, charge geometry, and depth-resolved imaging to confirm that retention happens where it matters.
Projects Mucus Barrier Modulation · Respiratory Infection Biology
Condensed Matter Arrangement Logic
The particle that arrives at a patient’s lung is not the formulation recipe. It is the frozen record of a transport competition that took microseconds to seconds — components redistributing at component-specific rates while the medium vitrifies, crystallizes, or gels around them. Bulk composition does not predict architecture without the process physics.
The lab treats this as a design problem rather than a process artifact. Component-specific Péclet numbers, evolving viscosity during drying, preferential interactions, and vitrification timing are the variables; surface composition, internal phase separation, and dissolution behavior are the outcomes. The same logic applies beyond spray drying — to antisolvent precipitation, freeze drying, solvent casting, gelation — wherever a transient process locks in a structured solid.
Projects Protecting Labile Payloads · Inhaled Product Performance · Spatiotemporal Synergy