报告题目：Discoidal Lipid Nanoparticles as a Generalized Platform: Applications and Characterization

报告人：Mu-Ping Nieh教授（美国康涅狄格大学）

报告时间：2025年12月19日上午9:30

报告地址：广州国际校区C3-c204

邀请人：程正迪院士

邀请单位：前沿软物质学院

报告摘要：

Lipid Nanoparticles (LNPs) have been widely used for drug delivery (e.g., mRNA-LNPs during the COVID pandemic). The challenges of LNPs are their stability and reproducibility. In this talk, I will demonstrate how fundamental understanding of molecular properties leads to controlling size-uniform discoidal LNP (also known as “bicelle”), potentially applicable for high-efficacy theranostic nanocarriers. They can entrap other nanoparticles or fluorophores and induce/enhance their emission efficiency. Furthermore, the bicelle can serve as polymerization template to produce size-controllable uniform polymer nanorings. This generalized platform can robustly form and has well-defined structure, thus suitable for scalable production. I will also introduce how small angle X-ray and neutron scattering (SAXS/SANS) can provide detailed structural information, enabling the design of LNPs.

个人简介：

Professor Nieh received his BS degree from National Taiwan University and PhD degree from University of Massachusetts, Amherst (both in Chemical Engineering). He is currently a full Professor at Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department and the director of Polymer Program at the Institute of Materials Science at University of Connecticut. He is also a member of Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE). His research mainly focuses on designing self-assemblies of soft materials (e.g., lipids, polymers, surfactants) based on their molecular properties for potential biomedical and pharmaceutical applications and developing structure-function relationships of the materials of interest. He is an expert on neutron, X-ray and light scattering, which are commonly applied to his research for nanostructural characterization.