Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

Novel drug delivery system (DDS), e.g., disease site-specific transport of small-molecule drugs, genes, and proteins, plays a crucial role in next-generation clinical medicine. Development of the innovative DDS will need the interdisciplinary research on biopharmaceutics, and clinical medicine as well as engineering. From the research field of biopharmaceutics, we have recently identified new membrane transport systems under disease conditions and developed a basis on the quantitative prediction of drug membrane transport by establishing quantitative targeted absolute proteomics (QTAP) (Fluids Barriers CNS 10:21, 2013). Dr. Toshiro Kaneko and colleagues in the engineering field have found that the atmospheric-pressure plasma irradiation for just a few seconds stimulates membrane transport in mammalian cells (Applied Physics Express 7:026202, 2014). Dr. Hideo Ohtsuka and colleagues in the medical field have developed the hepato-biliary-pancreatic cancer molecular biology based on clinical medicine. The purpose of our project is to investigate dynamics of the plasma-induced drug membrane transport and create a new interdisciplinary research field of “plasma pharmacodymamics” based on a combination of biopharmaceutics, plasma engineering and clinical medicine. Knowledge on the basic research will enable us to develop an innovative DDS for cancers and central nervous system diseases.