Welcome to the Oral Drug Delivery Lab! The research in my laboratory is centered on exploring the fundamental science underlying the formulation, absorption, and manufacturing processes of oral drugs, with the goal of improving bioavailability, efficacy, manufacturability, and minimize variability for problematic drugs and complex formulations. Our current research projects are centered on the following themes:

Solubility & Permeability Issues

A growing number of small molecule drugs from the discovery pipeline and on the market suffer from exceedingly low solubility and/or poor permeability and subsequently unacceptably low bioavailability. For otherwise promising therapeutics, low bioavailability is a major risk factor for their developability and can often lead to failure of a drug candidate to proceed through the drug development process. Various solubility and permeability enhancing formulation strategies have been developed to address this issue. However, the lack of mechanistic understanding renders the current formulation development process highly empirical. Our research focuses on understanding the mechanisms underlying various enabling formulation technologies and develop non-animal models to evaluate and predict formulation performance.

Processing & Manufacturing

Increased molecular complexity has led to significant challenges in the crystallization and formulation development of small molecule drug candidates in the drug discovery and development pipeline. Combining fundamental knowledge with industrial applications, our ongoing projects address several important questions at the interface of pharmaceutical processing, material sciences, as well as colloidal and interfacial sciences.

Microbial metabolism

More than 100 trillion microbes reside in the human gut, making it a natural bioreactor with one of the highest densities and diversity. Orally administered drugs and bioactive compounds can be metabolized by various bacteria strains found in the human gut, and this can lead to significant interpersonal variations in the efficacy and toxicity of orally delivered drugs. In this project, we aim to understand such microbiome-mediated drug biotransformation and its consequences.