Nanoparticles: Customized, coated by UNC, MIT – with boost from a ‘Wolfpacker’

Nanotechnology researchers often bring up Joseph DeSimone’s name when discussing people to watch for nanotech discoveries and research. But DeSimone, a chemistry professor who has dual appointments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and N.C. State University, is also watching. And for several years his attention has been trained on the work of Paula Hammond at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hammond, an MIT professor of chemical engineering, had her eye on DeSimone’s work as well and the awareness that each had of the other led to a collaboration over the last year that combines a UNC technology with a nanoparticle coating technique developed by Hammond’s MIT lab. Together the technologies are paving the way for specially-coated nanoparticles that could lead to more effective medicines. But who sparked this UNC/MIT collaboration? DeSimone credits Stephen Morton, a 2010 graduate of N.C. State who now works with Hammond.

“What made it really easy was that one of her graduate students got his undergraduate degree at N.C. State in chemical engineering,” DeSimone told WRAL TechWire. “A Wolfpacker at MIT.”

DeSimone’s team at UNC developed the nanoparticle manufacturing called Particle Replication In Non-wetting Templates platform, or “PRINT.” The technology allows for the production of nanoparticles of particular size and shape. Besides being customizable, the technology also make nanoparticle production scalable. The technology was the basis for Research Triangle Park nanotech company Liquidia Technologies, which licensed the technology from UNC. Because the size and shape of a particle can make a therapeutic more effective in targeting particular cells in the human body, Liquidia identified drug delivery as a key application. Liquidia’s first target was vaccine delivery and the company has struck partnerships with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative as well as a licensing deal with GlaxoSmithKline.

Hammond’s laboratory brings to the table a new coating technology. Hammond developed a way to coat nanoparticles with alternating layers of drugs, RNA, proteins or other molecules. In addition to developing the technique for depositing layers onto nanoparticles, Hammond’s lab also developed a spray technique that speeds the process. Combining MIT’s spray deposition technology with the scalable and customizable manufacturing capabilities offered by UNC’s PRINT results in a process that yields large quantities of nanoparticles while also reducing production time.

“The idea was to put these two industrial-scale processes together and create a sophisticated, beautifully coated nanoparticle, in the same way that bakeries glaze your favorite donut on the conveyor belt,” Hammond told MIT News.

The ability to make nanoparticles that are precisely engineered as well as reproducible is important for securing regulatory approval of a drug that uses the technology, said Hammond, who is also a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. DeSimone said the collaboration has only shown a small slice of what the technology could do. The next steps would include trying to deposit a broader range of reagents on the nanoparticles. Work also needs to be done to optimize the technology for a manufacturing setting.

But when the two technologies are ready for a commercial setting, Liquidia could be the company to use it. Liquidia has an exclusive license to anything that emerges from UNC’s labs related to PRINT. DeSimone said that the current work at Liquidia might be too far along to use the combined UNC/MIT research right now but he said it could find a place at the company sometime in the future.

Hammond and DeSimone are senior authors of a paper describing the research published in the online edition of Advanced Materials. Morton was the lead author of the paper.

The research was funded by the Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship, and a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council postdoctoral fellowship.