Principal Investigator/Program Director (Last, First, Middle): Afonin, Kirill, A
PROJECT SUMMARY
What if healthcare providers were equipped with biocompatible, biodegradable, robust, and affordable
treatment options that combine therapeutic modalities with controlled mechanisms of action? What if this
versatile technology had learning capacity and could be educated to recognize patient-specific diseases and
interfere with their progression by redirecting fundamental cellular processes? What if the very same formulation
could offer an additional means of control over patients’ immune responses and further advance favorable
therapeutic outcomes with minimal toxicities? These next generation therapies would then become a game
changer in helping to prevent, detect, diagnose, and treat diseases and disabilities at their source. With the
support from MIRA (R35) funding, we envision a data-driven platform, SMART NANPs (specific, modular,
adjustable, reproducible, and targeted nucleic acid nanoparticles), encoded by self-assembling nucleic acids. By
controlling the flow of genetic information across all forms of life, nucleic acids have become instrumental in
acquiring new knowledge about major cellular processes and origins of diseases. Besides their diverse biological
roles, these biopolymers can be programmed into NANPs with specified physicochemical properties and
functionalities that dictate NANPs’ biological actions with endless possibilities for reprogramming cellular
behavior through molecular signaling. We recently discovered that different architectural parameters and
compositions of NANPs, delivered to primary human immune cells, can activate monocytes and dendritic cells
to produce type I and type III interferons. This pioneering work on NANPs’ immunorecognition highlighted an
unforeseen clinical application for this technology in the field of vaccines and immunotherapy. A defined
structure-function relationship for any given NANP would then allow conditional actuation of its
immunorecognition or any other therapeutic activity through a set of embedded architectural codes. With this
notion, we introduced two orthogonal concepts of therapeutic NANPs which can be conditionally activated in
human cancer cells to release pre-programmed therapeutics. By uniting these breakthroughs and other
preliminary findings from my lab, as highlighted in the current application, and integrating them into a unified
network of SMART NANPs with programmable control of biodistribution, immunological activity, and therapeutic
modules, we will advance the current repertoire of therapies against infectious diseases and cancers (through
NANP-based vaccines and immunotherapies), cardiovascular diseases (through regulated coagulation by
thrombin-targeting NANPs), and address drug overdose and safety issues (through the biodegradable nature of
NANPs and their controlled deactivation). To maximize the successful translation of this technology, the
proposed program will employ a multidisciplinary approach that spans the fields of nucleic acid nanotechnology,
immunology, drug delivery, translational oncology, and machine learning. The long-term goal of this program is
to elevate SMART NANPs to the level of clinical use.
