SIBYLS Postdoc speaks at the 73rd Annual ACA meeting in Baltimore

SIBYLS Postdoc, Lee Joon Kim, presented her work with vaccines and drug delivery systems at the 73rd Annual ACA meeting in Baltimore, Maryland on Tuesday, July 11th. Dr. Kim spoke about her work in collaboration with SIBYLS scientists, Drs. Hura and Hammel, involving lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), which are an effective carrier for the delivery of oligonucleotide therapeutics, resulting in development and approval of the two mRNA vaccines in response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In her talk, she introduced the high-throughput small angle X-ray scattering (HT-SAXS) platform for screening LNP structures that enables data collection from 96 samples in only 1.5 hours. She explained how this system can be used complementarily with cryo-TEM to identify and validate structural features in bulk samples at an unparalleled rate. Dr. Kim and the SIBYLS group have also been working on a pipeline for the analysis to be conducted at the scale of data collection. Explaining that through this workflow, we can better understand how various composition and formulation conditions are linked to changes in structure and, ultimately, their function.