Week 0 Blog:

Hi, I’m Samahith, and this is my introductory Senior Project blog.

If you’ve ever had to get a shot at the doctor’s office or taken a lot of pills, you know the soreness and unpleasant feeling it leaves you with along with tremendous anxiety. My project works on a strategy to help you skip injections & pills and yet get the medication inside your body. This medicine delivery can be done by applying a patch or a cream and yet get the same benefits. This seems like a dream and an amazing scenario, but requires in-depth application of physics, chemistry, and iterative experimentation. This is exactly what I’m investigating for the next ten weeks. My project is all about optimizing Multilamellar Vesicles (MLVs) production, which is the drug delivery mechanism that will be used in these patches and creams.

In layman’s terms, MLVs are microscopic onions with around 20 layers made entirely of lipids (fats). These MLVs are incredible at trapping drugs or cosmetic ingredients inside their layers and carrying them deep into the skin, while also being able to slowly release the payload by spreading the payload throughout the layers. They are safer and more stable than their single-layered counterparts, as once the first layer is popped, the payload is lost. MLVs have one massive problem: they are incredibly inconsistent.

Currently, the standard way to make them is called thin-film hydration, which gives you a different result every single time. Sometimes you get a lot of vesicles without uniformity, sometimes you get barely any, but with perfect uniformity.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the lab at ASDRP working with lipids, Lipid Nanoparticles (LNPs), and Giant Unilamellar Vesicles (GUVs). I’ve seen how inconsistent and difficult making these vesicles can be. I realized that if we want to revolutionize drug delivery, we need a way to manufacture these vesicles reliably and efficiently.

For my Senior Project, I’ll be testing how different salt solutions interact with the lipid headgroups to see if we can increase uniformity and yield. My goal is to optimize the protocol for high-yield MLVs that can be used in pharmaceuticals and cosmeceuticals to make treatment cheaper, scalable, and anxiety-free. 

I am incredibly lucky to be working under the guidance of Dr. Joseph Pazzi at ASDRP and Dr. Rachna Sharma at BASIS, and I’m ready to get into the lab and start hydrating some lipids.

– Samahith