From Solid State Physics To Nanoparticles That Enable COVID-19 Vaccines And Gene Therapies: A Personal Journey

Abstract: 
In 1972 I received a PhD in solid state physics from the UBC Physics Department. I then made a direct transition into the Biochemistry Department at Oxford. This talk will follow my career since then, starting with very basic studies using NMR to understand properties of lipids in biological membranes. These studies evolved into using lipid-based systems as delivery systems for cancer drugs and nucleic acid-based drugs. I have focused on two fundamental problems associated with modern medicine. First, most commonly used drugs, such as anticancer drugs, are so-called “small molecules” that go everywhere in the body following systemic administration with less than 0.1% reaching disease sites such as tumours. We clearly need delivery systems to delivery these agents more accurately. Second, the reason we use small molecule drugs is because they are small enough to permeate into cells to reach intracellular target sites. Again, it would be of obvious benefit if we could develop systems to deliver larger nucleic acid-based drugs into target cells in order to use the same machinery that cells use to treat disease. These efforts have resulted in five nanomedicine drugs that have received regulatory approval and are now used clinically to treat diseases such as metastatic breast cancer as well as enabling the Pfizer.BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine that has played a pivotal role in alleviating the global pandemic.

Bio:

Pieter R. Cullis, PhD, FRSC, FRS, OBC, OC, Director, Nanomedicines Research Group, Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of British Columbia. 

Dr. Cullis and co-workers have been responsible for fundamental advances in the development of nanomedicines employing lipid nanoparticle (LNP) technology for cancer therapies, gene therapies and vaccines. This work has contributed to five drugs that have received clinical approval by the FDA, the European EMA and Health Canada. Dr. Cullis has also co-founded eleven biotechnology companies that now employ over 400 people, has published over 400 scientific articles (h index 138) and is an inventor on over 100 patents. He has also co-founded and been Founding Scientific Director of two National Centre of Excellence networks, the Centre for Drug Research and Development (now AdMare) in 2004 and the NanoMedicines Innovation Network in 2019. These not-for-profit networks are aimed at translating basic research in the life sciences into commercially viable products and have given rise to numerous start-up companies. 

Dr. Cullis has received many awards including the Order of Canada in 2021 and the VinFuture Prize (Vietnam), the Prince Mahidol Award (Thailand), the Gairdner International Award (Canada) and the Tang Prize (Taiwan) in 2022. Two recently approved drugs that are enabled by LNP delivery systems devised by Dr. Cullis, members of his UBC laboratory and colleagues in the companies he has co-founded deserve special emphasis. The first is Onpattro which was approved by the US FDA in August 2018 to treat the previously fatal hereditary condition transthyretin-induced amyloidosis (hATTR). Onpattro is the first RNAi drug to receive regulatory approval.  The second is Comirnaty, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine developed by Pfizer/BioNTech that has received regulatory approval in many jurisdictions including Canada, the USA, the UK and Europe. Comirnaty has played a major role in containing the global Covid-19 pandemic with approximately 6B doses administered worldwide in 2021 and 2022.

Learn More:

• See more about his research interests on his faculty webpage here
• Read UBC Faculty of Medicine article: "Dr. Pieter Cullis names 2024 Canadian Medical Hall of Fame inductee" here
• Read UBC faculty of Medicine article: "Dr. Pieter Cullis named fellow of U.K.'s prestigious Royal Society" here
• Read UBC Biomedical Innovation at UBC artcile "Biomedical Innovator Spotlight: Dr. Pieter Cullis" here
• For a breakdown on lipid nanoparticles and how this revolutionized the COVID-19 vaccines, see this reduced CBC Quirks & Quarks Q&A article: "Dr. Pieter Cullis talks lipid nanoparticles and vaccines of the future on CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks" here