Xuedong Liu
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Biochemistry
Getting large molecules such as proteins and RNA inside living cells is a persistent bottleneck in biology. Viruses and virus-like particles can do it but raise safety concerns; lipid nanoparticles and natural exosomes struggle with targeting specific cell types, with escaping into the cytoplasm once taken up, and with being made in large quantities.
- Fields
Biochemistry
Biomedical Engineering
Genetics
- Topics
extracellular vesicles
gectosomes
intracellular delivery
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2030
What they work on
- Develop stable all-in-one producer cell lines that generate gectosomes, engineered membrane vesicles that fuse with target cells, while expressing optimized guide RNAs for gene editing cargo.
- Engineer the viral glycoproteins displayed on gectosomes to improve selectivity for specific target cell types during delivery.
- Implement drug-controllable cargo release using the NS3 protease, a switchable viral enzyme, so that loading during production is separated from release inside the recipient cell.
- Scale up gectosome manufacturing using bioreactor production, affinity purification and optimized storage conditions to make the platform reproducible at larger volumes.
More about the research
This project develops an alternative carrier built from cell-derived membranes and engineered to be programmable: the user chooses the cargo, the cell type it goes to, and when it is released.
Why it matters
A delivery vehicle that reaches a chosen cell type and reliably releases proteins and RNA into the cytoplasm would make gene-editing and epigenetic experiments easier and more precise, supporting work on gene regulation and on models of genetic disease. If scale-up and targeting succeed, the same platform could eventually support therapeutic delivery, though that remains to be shown.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Stefano Menegatti
North Carolina State University, NC·Engineering
Determine how SMART peptide ligands capture the Cas9 protein and how adding guide RNA triggers its release, combining experiments and computational modeling of binding and kinetics.
Aravind Asokan
Duke University, NC·Biomedical Engineering
Test whether IceMG, an engineered protease that cleaves human and monkey IgG and IgM antibodies, blocks complement activation and modulates B-cell signaling, using human cell models, humanized mice and non-human primates.
Reza Shahbazi
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Biomedical Engineering
Engineer biomimetic lipid nanoparticles that incorporate exosome components shown to interact specifically with long-term hematopoietic stem cells, the self-renewing bone marrow cells that produce all blood cell types.
The school
University of Colorado Boulder: 36 labs on PI Pages, $718M a year on research, 447 research doctorates a year.
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