Vesicles

Extracellular Vesicles and RNA Drugs

Our Mission: Resolving biomedically relevant questions at the interface of chemistry and biology to enable pharmaceutical development of innovative drug delivery technologies and biological drugs

Our Scientific Focus:

  • Extracellular vesicles
  • RNA pathologies
  • RNA drugs

Our main scientific questions and projects:
(1) Biology & pharmaceutical applications of Exosomes (EVs)

  • EV based drug delivery
  • Food derived EVs – oral applications
  • Chemical functionalisation (tissue targeting, drug loading)
  • Therapeutically relevant mechanisms in EV biology

(2) Translational research – rare and orphan RNA pathologies

  • RNA repeat expansion diseases (ie C9orf72 ALS)
  • Pathological (RNA) mechanisms
  • Development of iPS based translational models
  • Tool compound and candidate discovery

(3)  Drugging RNA with bifunctional small molecules

  • Targeted RNA degradation / stabilisation / export /
 

First: EVs from CD63-GFP transfected parental cells analysed by cryo-electron microscopy. Second/Third: Human primary fibroblasts after incubation with HEK293 CD63-GFP exosomes (green) imaged by confocal fluorescence microscopy and DIC imaging.