Olivia Merkel, Professor of Drug Delivery in the Department of Pharmacy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, has received a Proof-of-Concept Grant from the European Research Council, building on findings from her ERC Consolidator Grant. The new ALINA platform is designed to accelerate the development of RNA therapeutics and conserve resources, and will serve as a blueprint for the broader adoption of data-driven nanocarrier development for RNA therapeutics.
LMU pharmacologist Olivia Merkel has thus been awarded a grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for the fourth time. She researches novel nanocarrier systems for the targeted local delivery of drugs. Her work focuses on the therapeutic use of RNA molecules that silence genes involved in disease pathogenesis in specific cell types or that can express therapeutic genes. Although these so-called RNA therapeutics hold enormous potential, their development is hindered by slow, expensive, Edisonian nanocarrier development approaches.
Moreover, these processes often have poor transferability from in-vitro to in-vivo settings. Current strategies rely largely on trial and error in which only one factor is varied at a time which often leads to only marginal improvements and is therefore very time-consuming. Her project ALINA – Active-Learning Inference for Nucleic Acid Delivery, which has been awarded an ERC Proof of Concept Grant, tests a new conceptual approach for an integrated platform combining machine learning and molecular dynamics. The goal is to accelerate the design and optimization of formulations for RNA-loaded lipid nanoparticles such that significantly fewer experiments will be required. Ultimately, the team will create an industry-relevant version of the ALINA platform that can demonstrate, based on quantitative reference values, that it works faster and with higher predictive accuracy than existing methods.
“ALINA will enable faster, more precise development of RNA therapeutics while using fewer resources and will make it possible to target organs beyond the liver,” says Merkel. “The project could thus remove a key bottleneck in the sector.” At the same time, it will accelerate the broader adoption of data-driven nanocarrier development approaches in biotechnology and pharmaceutical research. This could benefit between two and four million patients annually.
The ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant Program, which provides approximately 150,000 euros in funding, supports ERC researchers in translating their research findings into practical applications.