Smalltalks "From the Covid vaccine to lactose free milk: How we can use lipid nanoparticles as biomolecule delivery vehicles"

Abstract

One of the first things you are taught in chemistry at school is that water and oil don’t mix. Some molecules, however, have parts that like water (hydrophilic) and parts that like oil (hydrophobic or ’water hating’), such as the lipids which make up cell membranes in your body. These lipids are called amphiphilic lipids and are composed of a hydrophilic head group and a hydrophobic hydrocarbon tail. When you mix amphiphilic lipids with water, they can form a wide variety of structures, from simple spheres to a 2D sheet (bilayer) and intricate 3D channel networks, depending on the lipid shape and its environment (e.g. temperature and pH). This means that we can make complicated structures with properties, which can be tuned for different applications. One common application in both the food and pharmaceutical industries for these lipid structures is the encapsulation of biomolecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids (like DNA and RNA). As these biomolecules can be quite sensitive, encapsulation can help to keep them more stable. Here I will present two examples, where we have studied biomolecule encapsulation with two different systems: 1) different types of RNA and DNA in a Covid vaccine style formulation and 2) proteins used in the food industry to make different dairy products.