Biotherapeutics or biologics, such as proteins, peptides, and nucleic acids, comprise an increasing share of the pharmaceutical market, whilst offering new therapies for difficult-to-treat diseases. Most notable is their contribution to the vaccination efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. In most cases, however, biotherapeutics intrinsically suffer from poor pharmacokinetics, limiting their cellular uptake, biodistribution, and their intracellular therapeutic function; thus necessitating the development of efficient delivery systems (figure 1).

The research group focuses on the development of various delivery systems to facilitate the application of the biotherapeutic of interest. Research efforts are geared toward understanding the structure—property-activity relationships between the polymers employed in the delivery systems, the self-assembly process, and the biological performance of these delivery systems. For this purpose, high-throughput synthetic approaches are being developed in tandem with controlled formulation methods to facilitate reliable high-throughput screening processes. With this approach, we aim to develop and understand the SAR, ultimately allowing the reverse engineering of formulation through the application of machine learning approaches.  

Our research topics include developing the synthetic tools necessary for this goal, formulation development, in vitro screening of formulations, and preclinical evaluation in zebrafish embryo models.