Developing the Lipid Nanoparticles that Enabled the Delivery of a COVID-19 Vaccine

Pieter R. Cullis, PhD FRSC, FNAI (USA), Scientific Director & CEO, NanoMedicines Innovation Network,  Canada’s National Centre of Excellence in nanomedicines; Professor, Department of Biochemistry and  Molecular Biology, University of British Columbia. Dr Cullis and co-workers have been responsible for  fundamental advances in the design and development of nanomedicines employing lipid nanoparticle  (LNP) technology for cancer therapies and gene therapies. This work has contributed to five drugs that  have been approved by regulatory agencies in the U.S., Europe and Canada. Dr Cullis has co-founded  ten biotechnology companies that now employ over 300 people, has published over 350 scientific  articles and is an inventor on over 60 patents. He also co-founded the Centre for Drug Research and  Development, a Centre of Excellence for the Commercialization of Research (now AdMare) in 2004, the  Personalized Medicine Initiative (PMI) in 2012 and the NanoMedicines Innovation Network in 2019. Dr Cullis was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2004 and was also awarded the Prix Galien,  Canada’s premier prize for achievements in pharmaceutical R&D, in 2011. 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 BNT162b2, the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer/BioNTech that has now (December 2020) been approved in Canada, the USA, the UK and Europe. It is anticipated that more  than 1.3B doses of BNT162b2 will be administered worldwide in 2021.