About Us
What is PIGN?
PIGN provides a platform to exploit the synergies of therapeutic agents, neurointerventions and rapidly evolving imaging capabilities. Potent therapeutics too often have failed in clinical trials for unknown reasons. To combat this, we use advanced imaging to monitor and understand every aspect of the life cycle of therapeutics, including whole body biodistribution, brain accumulation, retention and clearance.
The feedback from imaging both during intervention as well as longitudinally is essential to guide the administration of therapeutics to the brain. These steps allow us to fully implement the concept of precision medicine in the field of neurointerventions.
Precision of drug delivery through imaging is particularly compelling from a translational perspective as it allows us to validate biodistribution in the clinical setting as well as to tune the process of delivery to the needs of individual patients, thus removing the variability of drug targeting that plagues the interpretation of clinical outcomes.
The challenge of drug targeting is particularly difficult in disorders of the CNS, because the brain is shielded from the external world by the skull and from the rest of the body by the blood brain barrier. We are currently using several disease models including stroke, brain tumors, radiation-induced brain injury, and ALS and imaging methods including MRI, PET, bioluminescence and intravital microscopy.
We are open to discussing and accommodating the needs of other scientists if their goals converge with PIGN’s mission of enhancing precision of neurointervention through advanced imaging. We are also open to partnering with industry since our tools may be helpful to their product development.
Why PIGN?
The mission of PIGN is to promote utilization of advanced imaging for a variety of neurointerventions in order to fully implement a paradigm of precision medicine which we believe is essential for improving outcomes of central nervous system (CNS) disorders. PIGN has been established in response to the frustratingly slow progress in therapeutics for of CNS diseases, which lag far behind treatments for other disorders.
For example, we are witnessing unprecedented progress in cancer treatment with the largest ever single-year drop in overall cancer mortality of 2.2% from 2016 to 2017. On the contrary, survival rates for patients with brain cancer have shown no notable improvement in population statistics in the last three decades.
The same situation applies to other CNS diseases such as Alzheimer disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), traumatic brain injury (TBI) and others. This is due in part to the barriers preventing drug accumulation at target sites in the brain. Breaching these barriers in a safe and effective fashion proved challenging, and we believe that real progress in this area requires advanced imaging and image guidance.
The mission of PIGN is well-aligned with goals of the Society for Image Guided Neurointerventions (SIGN), which previously was launched by the co-founders of PIGN.