Pieter Cullis

And at the time, I was incredibly fortunate to receive a fellowship at UCL to spend some time in Vancouver in British Columbia.

And I was able to study under a gentleman called Professor Peter Cullis, who was really what I define as the godfather of lipid nanoparticle technologies, which were ultimately deployed in all of the successful COVID vaccines from BioNTech and Moderna.

actually.

And so I think it was at that point, and really that was prior to the pandemic, that I was thinking, oh my goodness, you know, these delivery mechanisms can really be transformative to therapeutic development.

So how do you protect this fragile message and get it inside a cell? The answer came from work that had started decades earlier and it had nothing to do with vaccines.

In the late 1970s, a Canadian biochemist named Peter Cullis was studying something called lipids.

So let's understand what is a lipid.

Lipids are a group of molecules that includes fats and oils.

And I f- his name evades me.

Peter Cullis.

That's right.

Yeah.

I'm your host, Chantelle Moore, Scientific Communications and Engagement Strategist with the Office of Research, Faculty of Medicine, UBC.

Hello! We're so grateful to have two world-renowned scientists with us today, Doctors Peter Cullis and Anna Blakeney.

Peter is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Faculty of Medicine at UBC.

Anna Blakeney is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering and Michael Smith Laboratories at UBC and Canada Research Chair in Nucleic Acid Bioengineering.