The current research focus of the TMBJ covers drug discovery (drug target, drug design and drug synthesis), pharmaceutics (drug delivery and drug analysis), pre-clinical evaluation and clinical trial for bone and joint diseases.
Drug Target: Examining patients’ specimens from being constructed clinical biobank to understand the molecular mechanism of bone and joint diseases (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, fracture repair, osteoarthritis and osteonecrosis) for identifying novel therapeutic targets (e.g. non-coding RNAs, ubiquitin-related proteins and epigenetic-related proteins).
Drug Design: Using bioinformatics, system biology and data mining to establish an emerging paradigm of network medicine for seeking a novel approach to combinational herbs / compounds-based drug discovery in bone and joint diseases.
Drug Synthesis: Synthesizing conjugates of certain nucleic acid aptamers (possessing high specificity and affinity to specific cell type) and natural products to develop smart drug molecules with both cell-selectivity and intracellular bioactivity for achieving efficacy and safety.
Drug Delivery: Linking certain nucleic acid aptamers (possessing high specificity and affinity to specific cell type) with lipid-/polymer-based cargo system to develop targeted delivery system for translating the molecular understandings toward RNA interference-based therapeutics in bone and joint diseases.
Drug Analysis: Providing expert analysis in all facets of pharmaceutical analysis (including stability, related substances, impurities and active assays, etc.) to establish specification for active pharmaceutic ingredient (API) and formulation according to the instructions provided by FDA or CFDA.
Pre-clinical Evaluation: Employing state-of-art facilities to perform testing by three-dimensional microCT measurement and histomorphometric analysis in animal models for those developing drugs in bone and joint diseases.
Clinical Trial: Designing and developing cohort studies and randomized controlled clinical trials for evaluating the efficacy and safety of the novelly developed drugs in treating the related bone and joint diseases (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, bone erosion, osteoarthritis and osteonecrosis).
