çAutomated high-throughput hollow fiber manufacturing of synthetic antibodies
Project ID: 2228bd1000 (You will need this ID for your application)
Research Theme: Manufacturing The Future
UCL Lead department: Eastman Dental Institute
Lead Supervisor: Alessandro Poma
Project Summary:
When people are unwell, it is important to reduce the adverse events by administering the lowest drug dose possible whilst ensuring maximum efficacy. To fight diseases whilst minimising side effects on other healthy parts of the body, smart drug delivery systems are used, i.e. “small carriers” capable of loading the bioactives and driving them towards the body site responsible for the illness. Considering that the number of different molecules and cells in our body is astronomical, a precise “targeting system” is needed, and a current strategy relies on exploiting natural antibodies (and/or their fragments) that are specific for the target tissue. However, natural antibodies exhibit limitations (animal-derived production, high costs, poor stability/shelf-life), meaning that targeted therapies and diagnostics relying on these compounds are not easily accessible to all patients or have reduced therapeutic efficacy. Innovative, non-animal derived, synthetic antibodies called imprinted nanoparticles (MIP NPs) have been available for the past 10 to 20 years, however their therapeutic potential has never been fully exploited, also considering that translating this technology to the clinic requires an exponential scale up not only in production but also in post-production processes (e.g., checking the size of the nanosystems produced, their affinity, the amount of drug loaded, etc.). For this reason, this project will investigate the possibility of maximising the efficiency of the current MIP NPs production methods by implementing synthesis, purification and characterisation of the MIP NPs (and potentially MIP NPs-conjugated nanosystems) in a single stage. In this way, it will be possible to produce and characterise MIP NPs at a fraction of the time (hours vs weeks timescale) and cost, thanks to the complete removal of the manual post-production purification, concentration and characterisation steps required even with the current automatic synthesis approaches.