SANS for Structure Study of Microfluidic Lipid Nanoparticles for Plasmid DNA Delivery

Using the newly developed approach for producing lipid nanoparticles (LNP) with and without DNA from a microfluidic setup, we propose to determine the detailed structures within the LNPs formed by an ionisable cationic lipid, helper lipid, cholesterol and a poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) lipid, through a set of SANS runs under different isotopic contrasts. These DNA loaded LNPs mimic those reported in the literature as promising delivery vectors and work by collaborators in AstraZeneca have demonstrated their high transfection efficacy and low toxicity for different cell lines. Following our recent home lab characterisations, we seek to exploit the unique capability of SANS coupled with contrast variations to determine the inner structures of LNPs, thus relating the plasmid DNA transfection to the LNP inner structures tuned by different help lipids.