News

The Group has continued its efforts to “democratize” drug delivery. We had previously published a method on 3D printing micro-needle delivery systems, which graced the cover of PC Magazine and was covered by the popular media.

Well, we got bored with microneedles and went full Texas and built a gun to just shoot drugs right into people. Yes, Jet-injectors are/were a thing, but they have well-documented issues related to using water as the carrier vehicle. Vaccines and medicines dissolved in water used to be shot into people’s skin; however, the water would splash back out of the injection site and onto the jet injector, spreading disease. Having found a way to powderize and indefinitely stabilize anything—from viruses to DNA adjuvants, to whole cell bacteria, to full liposomes— inside a metal-organic framework called ZIF-8, we figured we could just shoot our drugs as a powder using high-pressure gas and… not only does it work, you can control the pharmacokinetics of the material by using carbon dioxide as the carrier gas.

Yalini and coworkers published the first article in Chemical Science that specifically looks at using carbon dioxide to dissolve the ZIF quickly once it gets into tissue. As we all know, carbon dioxide in water becomes carbonic acid, and acids very rapidly dissolve the ZIF shell. Consequently, when one shoots a ZIF-coated material into tissue using carbon dioxide, the material is delivered into the skin and is bioavailable almost immediately. If one uses air, which does not react with water and does not form any acids, the material enters the skin still in the ZIF coating. That coating takes a few days to dissolve, slowly becoming bioavailable over several days. This has become pretty popular with no shortage of write-ups in the popular media. This is all explained pretty well in a press release by the American Chemical Society (ACS). Yalini gave a talk at the ACS National Meeting in Indianapolis, and by chance, the ACS picked her abstract for a press release. They even made a video that explains it (below):

We even went a step further and showed how the mechanical stability of the ZIF promoted the shooting of delicate liposomes into tissues. Sneha’s PNAS article shows that the enhanced mechanical strength offered by a shell of only ~100 nanometers thin is sufficient to let liposomes be shot into the skin. Liposomes, like most lipid nanoparticles, are notoriously fragile and do not survive the strong forces of being shot onto a surface. Liposomes can resist forces up between 100pN to 1nN, which is very small; however, inside a ZIF Shell, about 100 nM thick, this increases to ~3 μN, representing an enhancement of many orders of magnitude.

Congratulations to two graduated rockstars, Dr Olivia Chastain (née Brohlin) and Dr Arezoo Sharivarkevishahi, who went off to be Senior Scientists at Merck and Pfizer respectively a few months ago. Jeremiah was exceptionally happy to have them return so he could hood them and remind them of how special they were one last time before they went back home with their fancy printed and bound thesis. Also, recently, following the successful deposit of his cheque, Jeremiah was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, which has permitted him to use the post-nominal “FRSC”, which Jeremiah enjoyed for about a month before the novelty wore off. The fancy little diploma the Royal Society of Chemistry sends is shown. It was printed on A4 paper, which was difficult to find a suitable frame for in the land of the free and home of the brave. That said, it was found. Now Jeremiah is off collecting other Fellowships to fatten his CV to match his ever expanding waistline.

The group is very thankful to the Welch Foundation for renewing our grant. This grant (100K direct costs per year) is focused on some of the fundamental discoveries made by group Alumna Arezoo Sharivarkevishahi in photoimmuno therapy using virus like particles. To celebrate, the group went out and played Whirlyball and laser tag where Jeremiah was basically beat the whole group single-handedly.

The recent article on developing novel whole-cell UTI vaccines in conjunction with the De Nisco Lab (Luzuriaga and Herbert et ACS Nano 2021) has been getting a lot of media attention! UT Dallas produced an excellent press release for the work, which can be read here.

Welcome, Orikeda and Ikeda Trashi (identical twins!) and Noora Kharji!

Arezoo Shahrivarkevishahi’s paper in JACS was recently covered by C&E News! Arezoo even goes on to speculate what the future of the project might bring: “The good thing about viruses is that we can not only decorate their surfaces but also load things inside them,” Shahrivarkevishahi says. Although the current study presents a simple version of the approach, loading Qβ coat proteins or another VLP with chemotherapy or other cancer drugs could further potentiate the treatment’s efficacy.” Congrats, Arezoo and team!

A recent collaborative paper with the Meloni lab has hit the news. Fabian Castro, a third-year grad student, did work with help from the Meloni Crew on making room-temperature stable liposomes, proteoliposomes, and protein-detergent micelles. All the formulations were so stable they could be stored at room temperature and even mailed around the US in an envelope for weeks at a time. There are pretty big differences between the COVID-19 vaccine and the liposomes we used here, but it’s probably obvious what we are doing next.

Jeremiah obviously got carried away and took five students this year. A huge welcome to (from top left across and then down and across) Perouza Parsamian (Փիրուզա Փարսամյան), Thomas Howlett, Ryanne Ehrman, Sneha Kumari, and Shailendra Koirala (शैलेन्द कोईराला).