Yamin Li
Upstate Medical University, NY·Pharmacology
Messenger RNA (mRNA) drugs work by delivering instructions that tell a patient's own cells to make a therapeutic protein, but mRNA is fragile and needs a carrier to reach the right tissue. The standard carriers are lipid nanoparticles — tiny fat droplets, as used in the COVID-19 vaccines — and they are usually built around positively charged amine groups.
- Fields
Pharmacology
Biomedical Engineering
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
mRNA delivery
lipid nanoparticles
sulfonium lipids
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2030
What they work on
- Expand the chemical diversity of sulfonium lipids — carriers that use a charged sulfur group instead of the usual amine — by adding new head, linker and tail building blocks, and relate these structures to self-assembly, mRNA delivery and biocompatibility.
- Characterize the distinctive physicochemical and biological behavior of sulfonium lipid nanoparticles through mechanistic studies of how they package and release mRNA cargo.
- Test organ-targeting mRNA/sLNP formulations in small animal models of acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome to build preclinical evidence for the platform.
- Test the hypothesis that lung-targeted delivery of IL-10 mRNA, coding an anti-inflammatory signaling protein, reduces lung injury while limiting systemic exposure.
- Evaluate the safety, tissue distribution and therapeutic efficacy of IL-10 mRNA/sLNP in a swine model of sepsis-induced ARDS, a system physiologically closer to human patients than mice.
More about the research
No single lipid design works everywhere: a formulation tuned for one cell type or disease often fails in another. Work here replaces the usual amine with sulfonium, a positively charged sulfur group, to create a different class of carriers, and then applies them to a lung disease with no good drug treatment.
Why it matters
Acute respiratory distress syndrome remains a leading cause of death in intensive care, with no therapy that reverses the underlying inflammation; the available option, corticosteroids, brings significant side effects. A lung-targeted IL-10 mRNA treatment tested in pigs could offer patients a more specific anti-inflammatory option. More broadly, a sulfonium-based lipid nanoparticle platform may expand the toolbox for mRNA medicines, with potential for improved safety and organ- or cell-specific targeting.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Zhenjia Wang
University at Buffalo, NY·Biomedical Engineering
Engineer liposomes built from ionizable cationic lipids to deliver docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 fatty acid, into neutrophils and release it efficiently once inside.
Samithamby Jeyaseelan
Louisiana State University, LA·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how the antioxidant regulator Nrf2 affects survival, bacterial clearance and neutrophil accumulation and function during carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae (CRKP) pneumonia in mice.
Jamie Meegan
University of South Alabama, AL·Physiology·Early-career
Test whether cell-free hemoglobin released from fragile red blood cells during sepsis disrupts the lung microvascular endothelial cell barrier by oxidizing low-density lipoprotein to oxidized LDL.
The school
Upstate Medical University: 7 labs on PI Pages, $59M a year on research, 23 research doctorates a year.
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