Wednesday, 31 August 11:00am – 12:00pm

This seminar will be delivered in Chemistry Lecture Theatre (TBA) and Online Zoom Please email chemistry.researchsupport@sydney.edu.au for zoom link and password.

Speaker: Prof. Robert K. Prud’homme; Princeton University

Host: Dr Max Roemer

Title: NANOMEDICINE: FROM HIGH TECH TO GLOBAL HEALTH

Abstract: Nanotechnology in drug delivery has a schizophrenic dichotomy of goals. One goal is to make drugs more bioavailable, which is normally associated with oral drug delivery. This bioavailability is associated with rapidly releasing drugs. The goal is achieved by making nanocarriers (NCs) with high surface-to-volume ratios, and with the drug in an amorphous state. The other goal is to encapsulate and deliver drugs to specific disease sites. This requires retaining the drug in the NC until targeted delivery is achieved. We will discuss examples of nanoparticle formulations based on our rapid micromixing platform – Flash NanoPrecipitation  (FNP)– that address both of these goals. The scalability of the FNP platform has allowed it to be applied to formulate a wide range of therapeutics from small molecules, to peptides, proteins and RNA. The 253 million doses of Pfizer LNP COVID vaccine were manufactured using our FNP platform. In addition, the technology is being sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to produce low-cost oral formulations of highly hydrophobic compounds for global health.. The fundamental processes involved in the kinetically controlled precipitations will be presented. In addition, post-processing including tangential flow ultrafiltration (TFF), spray drying and lyophilization of NCs will be presented. The new platform, inverse-FNP enables the encapsulation of soluble peptides, proteins and RNA at higher loadings than can be achieved with any other process.