In collaboration with the John Rogers Lab at Northwestern University, Sean Piantadosi, PhD, Michael Bruchas, PhD, and their team at the Bruchas Lab in the UW Center of Neurobiology of Addiction, Pain, and Emotion have built a paperclip-sized, wireless device that can deliver drugs to the brain and instantly track how it responds—all while the subject moves freely.
By combining microfluidic drug delivery and in vivo fluorescence recording, they obtain real-time readouts of how drugs are acting deep in the brain. This breakthrough could revolutionize drug development for mental health disorders and neurological diseases by making testing faster, smarter, and more precise.
An article describing the new research tool was published in the May 7 print issue of the CELL Press journal, Neuron.
Read the full story to learn more about how this recent development opens new possibilities for in vivo pharmacology.
Pictured above: Sean Piantadosi, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington Department of Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine