Speaker
Description
Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) are the delivery technology in the mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, and they are now being screened to deliver a broad variety of biological drugs. Despite their success, rational design of lipid based nanocarriers for precision medicine applications is complex. One of the key barriers is our current limited ability to relate nanoparticle structure and chemical composition to cellular uptake and payload delivery.
We have used small angle scattering (X rays and neutrons) to study structure and function relationships in lipid nanocarriers. Our studies demonstrated that the structure of our nanoparticles impacts their interactions in biological environments including enzyme (phospholipase) activity(1) and delivery of oligonucleotides.(2)
Using this approach, we have designed a panel of LNPs focusing on distinct lipid organizations with minimal compositional variation. Our results demonstrate that the inverted hexagonal phase (HII) morphology is not a necessary condition for delivery using these LNPs. This highlights the importance of advanced characterisation for rational design of LNPs to enable the study of structure – function relationships.
References
(1) H.M.G. Barriga, I.J. Pence, M.N. Holme, J.J. Doutch, J. Penders, V. Nele, M.R. Thomas, M. Carroni, M.M. Stevens, Advanced Materials 2022, 34 (26)
(2) M. Ojansivu, H.M.G. Barriga, M.N. Holme, S. Morf, J.J. Doutch, T. Kjellman, M. Johnsson, J. Barauskas, M.M. Stevens, Advanced Materials 2025, 37 (17)
