The use of RNA technology in therapeutics and vaccine development is on the rise. The recent success of mRNA vaccines has been driven by advances in the in vitro production of RNA molecules, the development of ionizable lipid nanoparticles (iLNP), and improved bioinformatic tools.
New Zealand's RNA Platform is an end-to-end mRNA production and quality control pipeline for the development of novel antigens, lipids and methodology. Since its establishment, the Platform has produced over 1,000 unique RNA products and delivered more than 500 pre-clinical vaccines to researchers across New Zealand and internationally, demonstrating both the scale and the reach of what has been built here.
As the majority of our customers require encapsulated products, we set out to create our own set of novel ionizable lipids. This enables our customers to develop their projects for clinical use while avoiding costly licensing fees. These lipids are all able to be formulated with our standard platform protocols using a NanoAssemblr microfluidic mixer. Quality control assessments are performed at each step to ensure consistent, high-quality output, with ongoing efforts to improve our assessment methods, reduce the material required and develop novel ways of assessing LNPs. Recently, we generated pre-clinical immunogenicity data demonstrating that this novel lipid set performs as expected in a vaccine setting.
This poster will show some examples of the progress we’ve made towards building and testing a novel lipid library to allow increased accessibility to iLNP technology in the clinic.