Speaker
Description
Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) are drug delivery vehicles that are widely used and FDA-approved. Their main purpose is to safely and efficiently deliver a drug — most commonly a nucleic acid — to target cells, where subsequent processes such as vaccination or gene silencing take place. Despite their widespread use, encapsulation and delivery efficiency remain relatively low; improving this efficiency requires a better understanding of LNPs' inner organization, behavior, protein corona, and other related properties. One property increasingly discussed in the current literature [1] is the N/P ratio: the molar ratio between the ionizable lipid's nitrogen-containing head group (N) and the phosphate groups of the RNA backbone (P). This N/P ratio can influence particle size, internal organization, and consequently encapsulation efficiency.
Molecular dynamics simulations make it possible to observe the system dynamically over time, revealing how LNP behavior, inner organization, and related properties change across different N/P ratio values.
[1] Yulin Mo, Alexander F. A. Keszei, Shagun Kothari, Heyi Liu, Anni Pan, Paige Kim, Jiachuan Bu, Albert Kamanzi, David L. Dai, Mohammad T. Mazhab-Jafari, Juan Chen, Sabrina Leslie, Gang Zheng; Lipid-siRNA Organization Modulates the Intracellular Dynamics of Lipid Nanoparticles. Journal American Chemical Society 26 March 2025; 147 (12): 10430–10445. https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.4c18308