In Congruence with Worlds Ahead Strategic Plan of FIU/ HWCOM, and NIH Road map INIP will engage in:
Personalized NanoMedicine (PNM) has recently emerged as a multi-disciplinary field that leverages nanotechnology to enable disease- and patient-specific medical diagnostics and treatment. However, in spite of its unprecedented potential, PNM is at its very early stage of development and no viable PNM technologies exist today. The use of nanoparticles is often considered as the main driving force of nanomedicine and especially of PNM. Because of their unique size- and shape-dependent properties, nanoparticles promise superior applications in diverse areas such as Neuro-AIDS, CNS diseases, cancer, drug delivery and targeting, immunoassays, functional MRI and fluorescence imaging, enzyme mobility, catalysis, chemical separation, and many others. For ideal medical treatment, every patient requires his or her own optimal combination of drugs based on pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and environment that can be controlled at the sub-cellular level. Using nanoparticles to precisely control drug dosage and composition as well as to detect even minute disease-caused environmental changes that can make such personalized treatment a reality. However, the physics that underlies the nanoparticles’ characteristics in the perspective of their intrinsic interaction with the human body in the aforementioned applications is extremely poorly understood. Revealing and controlling the interaction of nanoparticles with the patient’s body at the nanoscale, whether it is electric field-, magnetic spin-, photon-, or phonon-triggered, is vital for enabling perfect diagnostics, therapeutics and/or recovery/regeneration of all the medical functions. The goal of the proposed Center for Personalized Nanomedicine (CPNM), is to fill this gap via a focused cross-disciplinary study by experts in medical fields, physics and engineering of nanostructures, signal processing and bio-imaging. The unique research direction of CPNM is towards creation of groundbreaking nanotechnologies based on the most recently discovered multi-functional nanoparticles with a wide range of physical, chemical and electric properties to meet the infinite spectrum of patient and disease scenarios.
In view of the above, the mission of the Institute of NeuroImmune Pharmacology is to develop and sustain a program of translational research and training in drug use/abuse, tobacco use; and HIV/AIDS. The Institute aims to promote interdisciplinary translational research focusing on the interactions of the human immune system, substance use/abuse, tobacco use, HIV infection, cancer and nanotechnology based drug targeting.
