Advancing delivery of oligonucleotide therapeutics through next-generation delivery strategies and novel chemistries

Steven F. Dowdy is a Professor of Cellular & Molecular Medicine at UCSD School of Medicine. He received his PhD in Molecular Genetics from the University of California Irvine with Prof. Eric Stanbridge and was a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Bob Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute, MIT. His work over the last 10+ years has focused on developing new chemistry to tackle the rate-limiting endosomal escape problem that plagues intracellular delivery of all macromolecular therapeutics, especially RNAs. Dr. Dowdy has been advising biotech and pharmaceutical companies for 35 years, currently sits on five biotech science advisory boards, and is co-founder of Clear Skies Bio, which is focused on RNA delivery. He was an elected board member of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society (OTS) (2015-2021) and sits on the OTS science advisory board.

James Dahlman is Chief Scientific Officer at Readout Capital and the McCamish Early Career Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory School of Medicine. His lab works at the interface of chemical engineering, genomics, and gene editing by applying big data approaches to nanomedicine. The lab is known for developing DNA barcoded nanoparticles to measure how hundreds of nanoparticles deliver mRNA and siRNA in multiple cell types from a single animal in vivo. The lab uses these approaches to deliver RNA outside the liver.

James was a co-founder and Board Chairman of Guide Therapeutics, which was acquired by Beam Therapeutics. His trainees have become investors, started several companies, and work in some of the most cutting-edge organizations in RNA therapeutics. James received his Ph.D. in 2015 from the Harvard-MIT HST Program, where he studied with Robert Langer, and as a post-doc, studied CRISPR-Cas9 with Feng Zhang.

Kehinde Ross is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). He earned his PhD from the University of Sheffield, where he studied cytokine signalling proteins associated with inflammatory diseases. After postdoctoral training at Newcastle University, he started independent research related to microRNA (miRNA) expression and function at LJMU. His initial focus on skin has expanded to include studies of miRNA modulation in cancer, given that dysregulation of miRNA has been linked to various aspects of the disease. His current focus is the development of interdisciplinary collaborations to support the generation of nanocarriers for miRNA-directed therapy in cancer and other conditions. Kehinde leads the Transformative Peptide Chemistry for RNA Nanotherapies Thematic Doctoral Pathway program at LJMU, one of the inaugural cohort-based PhD training schemes in the university.