New automated platform could accelerate discovery of nanoparticles for medicine and materials science

Researchers at Imperial College London have developed an automated platform that could significantly accelerate the discovery of lipid nanoparticles, paving the way for faster development of drug delivery systems, synthetic biology applications, and advanced materials.

Developed by researchers in Imperial's Department of Chemical Engineering through a co-supervised PhD collaboration with AstraZeneca, LipidXplorer rapidly generates and screens lipid nanoparticle formulations. By automating a traditionally slow and labour-intensive process, the platform enables scientists to identify promising candidates more efficiently for therapeutics and other nanoscale applications.

Because membrane-based systems appear in so many areas of science, we think LipidXplorer could be useful far beyond therapeutic nanoparticle formulation alone. Bradley Diggines Researcher, Elani Group, Department of Chemical Engineering

Lead researcher Bradley Diggines said: "Because membrane-based systems appear in so many areas of science, we think LipidXplorer could be useful far beyond therapeutic nanoparticle formulation alone. It could help researchers in fields ranging from biophysical characterisation of biological membranes and synthetic biology to origin-of-life research."

Lipid nanoparticles are tiny structures made from fat-like molecules that naturally form the membranes surrounding our cells. Scientists can also create these particles in the laboratory, where they are used to deliver medicines, including the mRNA vaccines developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to study biological membranes and artificial cells.

Finding the right nanoparticle design is a complex process. Small changes in a particle's composition can significantly affect its size, stability and how it behaves in biological systems. Yet researchers typically have to prepare and test each formulation individually, making the process slow and limiting the number of particles that can be explored.

LipidXplorer addresses this challenge by combining robotics with microfluidics, technology that precisely controls tiny volumes of liquid. The platform automatically produces hundreds of different nanoparticle formulations every hour, each with a slightly different composition, before collecting them for further analysis.

By enabling researchers to generate and screen much larger libraries of nanoparticles, the platform could accelerate the discovery of new therapeutic delivery systems and provide the large, high-quality datasets needed to apply artificial intelligence to nanoparticle design.

We would be very excited to hear from researchers interested in applying the platform to their own work. Dr Yuval Elani Lead academic, Elani Group, Department of Chemical Engineering

The team's study, published in Advanced Materials, also demonstrates the platform's potential beyond drug delivery. Because lipid membranes underpin many biological processes, LipidXplorer could support research into membrane biophysics, synthetic biology, artificial cells and the origins of life. The technology could also be adapted to generate libraries of many other self-assembling nanoscale materials, including particles based on proteins, polymers and inorganic materials.

Dr Yuval Elani, who supervised the research, said: "We would be very excited to hear from researchers interested in applying the platform to their own work. In principle, LipidXplorer can be repurposed to generate massive libraries of many different types of self-assembled nanoscale particles, including systems based on lipids, proteins, polymers, inorganic materials, crystals and biomolecular condensates."