- [Lukas] My name is Lukas Uebbing. I'm a pharmacist and a Ph.D. student here at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, in the Department of Biopharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology. The Johannes Gutenberg University was first founded in 1477, and today, there's 31,000 students studying here and 4,400 scientists working here. Our group is the group of Professor Peter Langguth, and we have seven Ph.D.
students working in a broad field of projects, from effervescent tablets to creams for transcutaneous immunization or nanoparticles for different applications such as, for example, cancer immunotherapy. My research, I am using different technologies for lipoplex preparations, such as the classic film method or ethanol injection or also dual asymmetric centrifugation, and different physico-chemical characterization methods, such as, for example, DLS, zeta potential, fluorescence assays for mRNA incorporation, but also synchrotron X-ray radiation for SAXS measurements and neutron scattering for SANS measurements.
We are focusing on mRNA lipoplexes, so we use liposomal formulations to deliver mRNA to different target cells such as dendritic cells or T cells to reprogram the immune system to, for example, attack cancer by delivering the mRNA coding for the antigen and have the dendritic cell presented and by this, we hope to achieve a new kind of delivery system, a new class of nanomedicines to hopefully better combat, for example, cancer in the future.
For the lipoplex preparation, we use Avanti Lipids due to their very high purity, and especially for measurements like SAXS measurements, where you need very homogeneous samples to get any kind of disturbance out of the sample that might falsify your results.
So we use, for example, DOPE or DOPC as our base lipid from Avanti and ionizable lipids or functionalized lipids like PEG-lipids for functionalization of the particles. For our kind of experiments, we want to have very defined systems, especially for SAXS measurements, for example, because you want to do a modeling approach afterwards to get the internal structure of the particle.
So we use Avanti Lipids due to their high purity, so we don't have anything else in the sample that might contribute to the structure to the internal organization and falsify our results and make the modeling approach harder afterwards. In the future, I hope this research actually gets the status of a product that gets on the market that helps a lot of people, for example, as kind of a vaccine against typical kinds of cancer.
- [Vera] I'm Vera Cornet. I just started my Ph.D. here at the University of Mainz, in the Department of Biopharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology, in the group of Professor Langguth and I'm currently working on nanoparticles made of polymers and lipids as an mRNA delivery system. For the preparation of the nanoparticles, I am using, for example, the Avanti Extruder, because I'm using the film method until now, and I compare this with other methods for preparing liposomes and then building up the nanoparticles.
And afterwards, we do a lot of physicochemical characterization like dynamic light scattering to look at the size, and we also do a lot of X-ray experiments to discover the structure of the particles. I use the Avanti Mini-Extruder as one preparation method of the nanoparticles, respectively the liposomes, because I can decide over the size with different membranes I can fit in the extruder.
I was told that membrane rupture is a major problem in using the extrusion method in general, and with the Avanti Mini-Extruder, I didn't experience this because of the filter supports that stabilize the membrane very well. What I like about the Mini-Extruder is also the heating block because, for the liposome preparation, sometimes I need higher temperatures and steady temperatures to prepare the liposomes so that the lipids are liquid and, therefore, it's a great opportunity to control temperature while producing them.
Although at the moment, I work with lipids with very low transition temperatures, I will, in the future, also work with other lipids with higher transition temperatures and, therefore, I will have to prepare the liposomes at higher temperatures, probably, and, therefore, I can use the heating block, which is easily heated to any temperature I want. We want to gain a better understanding of these particles that could provide a new method to fight cancer, and it should also be the next step in providing general information for new delivery systems.