CPC-M researcher Prof. Olivia Merkel has been awarded a fourth grant from the European Research Council (ERC). With this Proof of Concept Grant, she will develop a new platform for nanocarriers for RNA drugs. The funding builds on her ERC Consolidator project.
Olivia Merkel is Professor of Drug Delivery at LMU’s Department of Pharmacy, where she develops nano transport systems that deliver drugs to specific sites in the body. Her research focuses on RNA therapeutics that can switch off genes involved in disease or mediate production of new proteins in defined cell types.
So far, the development of suitable nanocarriers has been slow, costly and often based on trial and error. Results from the lab only partly translate to the body. In addition, many drugs accumulate mainly in the liver rather than where they are needed, such as the lungs.
A new platform to speed up development
In the ALINA project (Active-Learning Inference for Nucleic Acid Delivery), Olivia Merkel combines machine learning with molecular dynamics. The platform is designed to develop lipid nanoparticles for RNA faster and in a more targeted way, while reducing the number of experiments.
In the long term, the team aims to build an industry-ready version, which shall confirm that potential drug formulations can be predicted faster and more reliably than with current methods.
“ALINA can improve the development of more precise and efficient RNA therapeutics and help extend their delivery to organs beyond the liver,” says Olivia Merkel. This could remove a key bottleneck in the field. At the same time, the approach could promote wider use of data-driven methods in biotech and pharma.
Example from practice: RNhale
One application area is the lung. In her start-up company RNhale GmbH, Olivia Merkel collaborates with CPC-M researcher and co-founder Benjamin Winkeljann on a platform for RNA therapies for lung diseases. The goal is a technology that delivers RNAi molecules precisely to the lungs. Patients with severe asthma in particular could benefit from such a therapy.