Pharmaceutical Biophysics
Pharmaceutical research has fallen into a rut known as “Erooms Law”: while the resources expended increase exponentially the number of new approved drugs per year remains constant. This is partly due to the constricting paradigm of conventional drug design, based around finding molecular fits to the active sites of target proteins and high throughput screening: a mostly blind data driven approach. Biophysics represents the perspective that the biological systems in question, and drug delivery devices being developed, can be understood through the multiscale mechanistic paradigm provided by biophysics. This approach involves the application of a combined toolkit of computational and experimental methodologies that, together, can obtain this multiscale understanding that allows for the application of a rational design approach. Our group contains a unique synergy in both computational and experimental expertise held by the two group leaders, Drs. Alex Bunker (computational) and Tapani Viitala (experimental). Our research covers several areas of pharmaceutical research including the development of liposome based drug delivery systems (LDS) and other areas of nanomedicine, bioinspired and biomimicking surfaces, label-free analytic methodology development and advanced drug design strategies.