Areas of Impact

The future of personalized patient care starts with innovative research.

The Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation envisions a world where patient care will be customized to each individual. We value collaboration and have brought together top researchers from different fields – from medicine to life sciences to engineering – to focus on unsolved medical problems.

We are focused on patients first and addressing problems to then develop and invent technologies that will enable us to address the health of individuals by bridging the gap between sickness and wellness by understanding diseases. We will educate the next generation of diverse scientists and work collaboratively across multiple disciplines to develop personalized approaches to identify the medical needs of patients, foster creative ideas to meet those needs, and rapidly translate that into real-life products or devices.

Our Research

Our research makes a difference

Mentor and Educate World Class Scientists

We believe the next generation of scientists and engineers are vital to the work we are doing now and future medical discoveries. We value collaboration and recognize that in order to tackle the greatest medical challenges to benefit patients, we need to work across multiple disciplines. At the Terasaki Institute we educate and mentor the next generation of scientists and engineers by Instilling the value of collaboration Creating educational opportunities within our labs and through seminars Motivating scientists to be curious to expand their knowledge Training scientists to be entrepreneurs to pursue real work application of their work Encouraging curiosity and focus on human health Empowering scientists to aim big and think creatively in their research approaches.

Prevention, Treatment and Cures for Diseases

We recognize the importance of understanding diseases is the key to developing the right diagnosis and treatment for a disease and for a patient. Imagine having a personalized treatment based on your genetic disposition, which could cure your disease or minimize your pain and side effects from treatments. The Terasaki Institute is focusing on research that is making that possibility a reality. We are focused on preventing and curing diseases and personalizing treatments for patients through our research in areas such as: Developing tumors-on-a-chip in efforts to understand how tumors affect human tissue and monitoring their response to drug delivery Modeling progeria-on-a-chip, we studied how different possible drugs minimize the progression of this genetic disease and can prolong the life of a patient.

Drug Discovery

One of the biggest challenges of drug discovery, in addition to it costing billions of dollars, is that it can take a 10-15-year long process and often times the drug will fail in clinical trials. And even if a drug passes, every individual may experience different side effects or it may have a negative interaction with another medication the person is taking for another ailment. Our research aims to create technology platforms that will create safer, quicker, and more effective methods for drug discovery. Developing personalized physiological models to more accurately predict human tissue interaction with drug toxicity. Using our organs-on-a-chip technology to better replicate the environment of the human body to reduce animal experiments.

Saving lives and Improving Quality of Life

We strive to save lives through our research and focus on improving the quality of life for transplant patients, individuals living with cancer or other debilitating illnesses, recovering from surgery or dealing with an injury. We envision a world where medical professionals have the tools and resources at their disposal to detect diseases early enough for a preventative treatment and cure and to minimize patient risks through minimally invasive therapies. Our technology platforms and educational efforts are improving the quality of life for patients through personalized treatments by Developing a “smart dressing” for chronic wound healing application for early detection of infections Creating smart wearable devices to monitor human motion and detect biomarkers to improve patient treatments Translating clinician work to improve transplant challenges, serve as an educational resource, and designing patient-centered health measures