Benjamin Nachod, SEAS ’26, Clarksburg, MD
This year I had the opportunity to spend the summer with the Mitchell Lab to continue work on several projects I’ve been involved with during the academic year and jump into a couple new projects in the lab! This grant gave me the opportunity to dive into my own independent project in the lab and apply all the research techniques and skills I’ve learned throughout the past year and a half that I’ve been with the lab.
This summer I got to shift gears from the translational side of our lab’s work and delve deeper into a more mechanistic study of LNPs, working to design a new drug delivery platform to allow for incorporation of corticosteroids into mRNA LNPs as a fifth excipient without compromising LNP functionality with the hopes of suppressing LNP-induced inflammation. Developing strategies to mitigate inflammation while maintaining efficient cargo delivery is essential for ensuring the safety and efficacy of LNP-based RNA therapeutics in clinical settings.
My work this summer was difficult, but extremely rewarding at the same time. Most of my previous work in the lab revolved around T cell engineering for applications in autoimmune diseases. In this project, we utilized a well-established LNP formulation to transfect primary T cells with Foxp3 mRNA, the master transcriptional regulatory molecule associated with regulatory T cells. These engineered cells could then be used for their suppressive functionality to suppress the growth of effector T cells. Having focused on more translational biomaterials research during my previous work, it was a major change for me to have to build a new LNP platform from the ground up. Rather than having a mindset for application of a pre-existing technology, this work challenged me to think about how to plan my experiments more methodically to understand how incorporating steroids into LNPs can change the delivery, inflammatory effects, and toxicity of these particles on a granular level.
Aside from growing as a scientist this summer, I’ve had the chance to explore Philadelphia even further this summer and have had a lot of fun outside of lab finding new places to eat, relax, and explore! I couldn’t have asked for a better few months and I’m incredibly grateful for the support of Career Services who made it possible for me!
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2024 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
