Current Projects

​Research page
Sequencing of the human genome has brought tremendous advances to biomedical research and the coming molecular revolution in medicine will see greatly improved patient care and outcomes.  While exciting, these new diagnostics and therapies are often costly and can place financial burden on even well resourced health care systems.  On a global scale, with two thirds of the world living on less than $3/day, most people cannot expect to benefit from these technologies.  Research in the Pardee lab is dedicated to extending the reach of today’s advanced health care and is pioneered technologies to tackle the challenge of health care accessibility.
 
Regenerative Medicine 
The emerging field of regenerative medicine holds the promise of providing radically new approaches for the treatment of disease.  As a member of the University’s regenerative medicine program, Medicine by Design, our lab is dedicated to the development of new technologies in this space and we are doing so with an emphasis on addressing affordability.  This includes engineering cell-based solutions and the application of our cell-free technologies to ensure that the envisioned benefits of regenerative medicine are within economic reach for more patients.
 
Portable diagnostics
As part of an international team, we recently demonstrated a portable and programmable system for the detection of disease with the development of molecular diagnostics for the Zika virus in only six weeks.  These low cost tests (< $1) can detect the virus at clinically relevant concentrations directly from infected serum without purification or concentration of the virus.  These tools and others in development have the potential to provide diagnostic capabilities that are usually limited to well-resourced clinical labs to virtually anywhere.  The Pardee lab is now leading a CIHR- and IDRC-funded patient and field trial of these low cost diagnostics in Latin America (http://pardeelab.org/zikadiagonostics).
 
Distributed drug manufacturing
Other efforts from the lab focus on improving access to fundamental therapeutics, like vaccines, and other powerful protein-based drugs.  These therapeutics often require distribution with uninterrupted refrigeration and can be costly.  Our group, along with collaborators, has begun to address this challenge by harnessing our freeze-dried cell-free system, which can be distributed at room temperature, to create an on-demand platform for manufacturing drugs.  Proof-of-concept work demonstrated the manufacture of over 50 molecules, validating the bioactivity of many including animal studies that demonstrated the efficacy of vaccines produced with our portable manufacturing capability. 

Our lab builds off the work performed by Dr. Pardee during his postdoctoral fellowship at The Wyss Institute in Boston, on the paper-based synthetic biology platform. ​