The versatility, stability, and ease of use of encapsulin nanocompartments offer widespread benefits for drug delivery. When medications, proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, or other drugs are delivered through encapsulins, they last longer in the body and penetrate more deeply in tissues. For diseases such as cancers or diabetes, we can use encapsulins to selectively deliver chemotherapeutics or insulin to specific cell lines of our choice. We set out to hold a speaker event series, so that our team could learn more about encapsulin research and nanoparticle drug delivery. We met virtually with professionals in both academia and industry to gain feedback on our project and talk about the future of this technology. We certainly learned a lot about the potential applications of our research to improve drug delivery outcomes as well as applications in other realms of research that we never considered before!
Speaker Series
Dr. Yu Lau: University of Sydney
We were fortunate to meet with Dr. Lau to discuss his work on encapsulins and learn more about the versatility of encapsulin research and the future of this field. We discussed the use of encapsulins in eukaryotes to compartmentalize chemical reactions. He mentioned the difficulties in disassembling encapsulins in their native hosts, which is something to consider when endocytosing encapsulins in eukaryotic cells. We discussed the feasibility of using encapsulins for drug delivery, the potential challenge of releasing them from endosomes, and using encapsulins in other areas of medicine and technology. We also learned that there are more research efforts to investigate their use in material sciences. He also walked us through the use of size-based characterization before doing endocytosis. Our talk with Dr. Lau allowed us to learn more about encapsulins, discuss the inner workings of encapsulins in cells, and learn about their usefulness in other fields and projects.
Dr. Mimi Yung: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Our conversations with Dr. Yung allowed us to learn more about uses for encapsulins in medicine and ecological considerations for their use. She walked us through her project using encapsulins to enhance the expression of antimicrobial peptides. She mentioned the importance of considering containment and how our system will react with the environment. She also recommended we consider looking into their regulation and fate after being endocytosed in the cell, which we hadn’t entirely considered before our meeting. We were interested in hearing about her work using non-cage forming encapsulins, which allowed us to consider other biotechnology used to attach cargo for delivery into eukaryotic cells.
Dr. Leaf Huang: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dr. Huang gave a wonderful talk to our group about the use of lipid nanoparticles to deliver nucleic acids. A long-term goal of our project is to use encapsulins to deliver nucleic acids, so his work allowed us to consider some of the potential challenges of this feat, along with a better understanding of the physiology and clinical implications of nanoparticle drug delivery. Something we had not previously considered was the possibility of off-targeting with these nanoparticles and improving the composition of lipid nanoparticles for more targeted delivery. In relation to his work, we also discussed the use of modified RNA for better stability in the body, which is common in other vaccines such as the COVID-19 vaccine. We briefly discussed using protein nanoparticles for mRNA delivery, to which he suggested that using peptide hormones for targeted delivery seems feasible but that other targets such as mannose could also be considered. Overall, we gained a much deeper appreciation for nanoparticle drug delivery and the ways his group works to alleviate some of the associated challenges with it, giving us inspiration for our future endeavors in delivering RNA using encapsulins.
Dr. Tom Colace: Kernal Biologics
A future implication of our project would be to investigate the use of encapsulins as a nucleic acid delivery system. As such, we met with Dr. Colace to discuss his work with lipid nanocompartments and factors to consider in industry. He walked us through lipo-drugs from start to finish and presented us with important considerations for developing our project further. We discussed the importance of targeting nanoparticles, as the composition of lipid nanoparticles can be used as a means of targeted delivery to different organs in the body. Another consideration that we discussed was the immunogenicity of any foreign body that is given as a therapeutic, and how to address immunogenicity of our protein-based system. This allowed us to consider screening for future implications of our project. With his knowledge of industry, he shed some light on FDA regulations that are important to consider for large-scale drug design, such as nucleic acid encapsulation percentages and storage. Speaking with Tom allowed us to consider future directions for nucleic acid delivery using encapsulins and screening efforts to test for encapsulation.