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Drug delivery


A matter of time “I


f you didn’t have the nanoparticles,” says Robert Langer, MIT institute professor and Moderna co-founder, “you wouldn’t have the


vaccines”. There’s no fastest development in history without the half-century saga of a family of engineered fats. Not a moment too soon, mRNA technology, lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) and bioinformatics have turned the pharmaceutical industry upside-down. “It’s really amazing that the three technologies came in basically one timing,” says Dan Peer, director of the laboratory of precision nanomedicine at Tel Aviv University. “You bring together three different strategies into one product and, at the end, it could change the world.” Speaking from his office in Israel, where more than half of the population has been fully vaccinated – most with Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty – Peer means that in two senses. Already, mRNA


World Pharmaceutical Frontiers / www.worldpharmaceuticals.net


vaccines are playing a vital part in tackling the pandemic, but in the longer term, the same technologies will enable drug development to take place over months rather than years and will result in far more targeted, far less toxic therapeutics with smaller manufacturing footprints.


“Almost everything is druggable at this point,” adds


Peer, who, when he says, “we are actually living inside the revolution”, also means that there’s a revolution happening inside us. “Think of all those rare genetic diseases where you need to bring a protein: instead of bringing a new protein, now you can just generate it – it’s like there’s a factory inside your body.” Pieter Cullis, head of the Nanomedicines Research Group at the University of British Columbia and co-founder of Acuitas, provider of LNPs for the Pfizer- BioNTech vaccine, expands on the same point. “Say


9


Without lipid nanoparticles, there’s no mRNA vaccine, no 95% effi cacy, and the route out of the pandemic is many times longer and narrower. Tim Gunn speaks to Robert Langer, MIT institute professor and Moderna co-founder, Pieter Cullis, head of the Nanomedicines Research Group at the University of British Columbia and co-founder of Acuitas, and Dan Peer, director of the laboratory of precision nanomedicine at Tel Aviv University, to trace the decades-long journey to this point and ask where LNPs might take the world next.


LuckyStep; J. Marini; CKA/www.shutterstock.com


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