'Playing it Safe Can Lead to New Horizons: How Rationally Engineering Lipid Nanoparticles (LNPs) for Improved Safety Enabled the First Safe & Effective DNA-LNPs' - Lecture

Lecture by Prof. Jacob Brenner (Assistant Professor and attending physician (pulmonary and critical care medicine) at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA)

The billion-patient success of the COVID-19 mRNA-lipid nanoparticle (LNP) vaccines demonstrated the unparalleled ability of LNPs to deliver nucleic acids. However, to move LNPs from vaccines to therapeutics, two challenges arose: 1) LNPs are highly inflammatory. To address this, we identified the mechanisms underlying LNP-associated inflammation, guiding the engineering of the first non-inflammatory, high-expressing LNPs. 2) mRNA as a cargo suffers from being short-lived and lacking cell-type specificity. To overcome this, we created the first safe and effective DNA-LNPs, which were previously impossible due to severe toxicity. With these innovations, we can now utilize mRNA-LNPs for acute inflammatory diseases and DNA-LNPs for chronic diseases, where we can achieve cargo protein expression for 6 months per dose and in a cell-type-specific manner.

• When: September 19, 11:00 
• Where: at the Department of Pharmaceutics in the ‘Faculteitszaal’
• More information: contact Prof. Bruno De Geest (Br.DeGeest@UGent.be)  
• Free Participation
• Please inform Prof. De Geest if you would like to have a chat with Prof. Jake Brenner either before or after the seminar