Events

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have transformed modern drug discovery and development campaigns over the past decades, advancing treatments for cancer, autoimmune, and infectious diseases. These pharmaceutical products are twice as likely to succeed in clinical trials over small molecules but are notoriously expensive to biomanufacture, complicated to stabilize for long-lasting shelf life, and challenging to deliver directly as large proteins. One appealing solution involves vectorizing therapeutic mAbs into encoding DNA, injecting this non-integrating payload into muscle, and allowing patients’ bodies to produce endogenous proteins over time. Polymer nanoparticles (PNPs) can enable this genetic shortcut to controlled release of mAbs, as polymer-based carriers are well poised for DNA encoded biologics (DEb) over viral and non-viral lipid-based options. In this work, we present customized PNPs that deliver plasmid DNA (pDNA) encoding for PGT121, an anti-HIV antibody of interest in clinical trials. Our SAYER™ materials informatics platform leverages large computational datasets of 6000+ in-house experimental polymers to facilitate materials discovery and refinement via active learning. After screening polymer candidates for PGT121, intramuscular delivery of resorbable PNPs in mice resulted in >1 μg/mL mAb production over 56 days post-injection. This therapeutically relevant window has not been achieved for any other delivery system to date. Furthermore, pharmacokinetic profiles were tunable by pDNA dose, PNP formulation conditions, and animal re-dosing, enabling machine learning techniques to further optimize delivery performance. Finally, we show that PNPs for DEb delivery is universal to secrete model peptides and small proteins with wide implications in obesity/diabetes, osteomalacia, muscular dystrophy, and liver disease.

Dr. Jeff Ting received his BS in Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas. Jeff received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2016, working with Frank Bates and Theresa Reineke on synthesizing tunable polymers for oral drug delivery. During his doctoral studies, he was a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the AIChE Pharmaceutical Discovery, Development and Manufacturing Student Award, and the University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. Afterward, Jeff worked as a NIST-CHiMaD Postdoctoral Fellow with Matt Tirrell as part of the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (CHiMaD), supported by NIST and the Materials Genome Initiative. His work focused on understanding the fundamental static and dynamic properties of polyelectrolyte complex assemblies. In 2020, Jeff joined 3M as a Senior Polymer Scientist as part of the Materials Informatics (MI) Group in the Corporate Research Materials Laboratory. He was a lead experimentalist in launching a broad effort to strategically apply MI tools and data-driven methodologies for industrial materials research and product development workflows. He was recognized as 1 of 12 individuals for the 2021 Young Observers Program by the U.S. National Committee of IUPAC. In 2022 Jeff became a Senior Scientist and the first employee at a venture-backed biotech startup, Nanite, in Boston, MA. He is a 2023 ChemComm Emerging Investigator, the recipient of the 2025 ACS POLY Young Industrial Polymer Scientist Award, and a member of the AIChE Area 8A Rising Stars in Industry Class of 2025.