Project description
Vesicle-based protein therapeutics
Many emerging pharmaceuticals are proteins. Their efficacy, however, is dependent on a number of physical and chemical factors, which has led to the use of polymers as stabilising agents. The EU-funded ProDelivery project proposes to develop a chemical platform for the synthesis of protein-encapsulated polymeric vesicles. Researchers will study vesicle structure–activity relationships and their impact on protein stability and delivery to biological targets. The generated platform is highly versatile and has the potential to overcome current limitations in systematic studies of polymer-based protein therapeutics mainly due to high cost.
Objective
The delivery of therapeutic protein drugs in biological environments is hampered by their relative sensitivity to a broad range of physical and chemical factors. To address this loss in therapeutic efficacy, chemical formulations using polymers as stabilising agents have been proposed. Unfortunately, systematic studies of these formulations are often limited in scope owing to the relatively high cost of protein therapeutics as well as restrictions on the types of chemical transformations that can be performed without loss of protein activity. Hosted within Prof. Molly Stevens' labs at Imperial College London (www.stevensgroup.org recognised by >25 major awards), the overall goal of this proposal is therefore to develop a versatile chemical synthetic platform enabling the efficient synthesis of protein encapsulated polymeric vesicles. This will be achieved by exploiting low volume, high throughput polymer chemistry to allow for a cost and time efficient study of vesicle structure-activity relationships in the context of protein stabilisation and efficacious delivery of proteins to biological targets. The proposed combinatorial approach is highly versatile and can, in principle, be applied for the study of a broad range of proteins or other biologically relevant therapeutics. The versatility and translation potential of this project will be fully evaluated within the excellent infrastructure available within the Stevens Group.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
SW7 2AZ LONDON
United Kingdom