Olivia Merkel, Professor of Drug Delivery at LMU's Department of Pharmacy has been awarded a Proof of Concept (PoC) Grant by the European Research Council. Her new project builds on insights from her ERC Consolidator Grant project. Through the PoC program, the European Research Council helps researchers translate their research findings into practice.
Olivia Merkel 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. "This often leads to only marginal improvements and is therefore very time-consuming," says Olivia Merkel. "In addition, it's rarely possible to administer these therapeutics to organs beyond the liver, where the active agents often accumulate."
