Computational design of biocompatable delivery systems (2023 – 2025)

Biocompatible delivery systems allow enhanced delivery of pharmaceuticals, vaccines and other biological payload molecules, with varied effects including extending the pharmaceutical half-life of drugs, increasing adsorption and decreasing immunogenicity. While these agents have increased the efficacy of many biological therapies, further research is required to better target these agents to the specific cell or receptor of interest. This project will examine strategies to increase the selectivity of biopolymer and lipid delivery systems to enhance the ability to target specific cell types or membrane proteins, reducing off-target effects. Starting from lipidomic data from key cell types (eg, prostate cancer, macrophage, neuroinflammation, melanoma)  this project will use computational techniques to identify how the lipidome composition and physical properties of different cell membranes impacts their interaction with a range of lipid nanoparticles and/or biopolymer delivery systems.  The project requires good collaboration skills, a broad understanding of chemistry, biochemistry and/or polymer chemistry, and a willingness to learn skills in computational chemistry, including small molecule parameterisation and multiscale modelling techniques ranging from QMMM to atomistic and coarse-grained molecular dynamics.

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