“Despite the economic and social toll of billions of patients suffering from neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders, a major bottleneck remains in successfully delivering therapeutics to the brain to address these conditions,” says Viviana Gradinaru (BS ’05), the Troendle Professor of Neuroscience and Biological Engineering at Caltech, director and Davis Leadership Chair of the Merkin Institute for Translational Research at Caltech, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

“Our work provides a new and powerful solution for delivery of both preexisting therapeutics that could, in principle, work but don’t reach the brain, and new therapeutics that haven’t been considered yet.”