Kavli Prize Laureate Lectures
Nanoscience

incl. 5 minutes for Q&A from audience

A scientific road not taken: My path from chemical engineering to nanotechnology and biology and medicine.
My career has not been straighForward. In a way, I followed Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”. Although I am a chemical engineer and I’m proud of that, I took a path from chemical engineering to nanotechnology to biology and medicine. This was very unusual many decades ago. In so doing, I met with rejection and ridicule early in my career. However, by going down that path I was able to make discoveries that I hope have saved and improved lives and I’ve been able to train a great number of people who are going down the road I began traveling over 50 years ago. In this lecture, I will discuss some of the chemical and engineering advances we made to create polymer and lipid micro/nanoparticles to deliver macromolecules including nucleic acids (e.g. DNA, RNA) and the impact that these systems have had.

incl. 5 minutes for Q&A from audience

Semiconductor Nanocrystals for Biomedical Imaging, Health, and Sustainability
Colloidal semiconductor nanocrystal quantum dots are tiny crystals whose color depends upon the size of the crystal. This presentation will describe how it was possible to leverage this size-dependent nanocrystal color and to couple the nanocrystals with biological molecules, revealing for the first time how this new type of fluorescent probe could become a powerful tool for bioimaging. Water-soluble nanocrystals required for biological applications were achieved by extending the chemistry of the core-shell systems through a third silica layer that made the core-shell water soluble 2(Science, 281, 2013, (1998)).

Further, the silica surface layer was modified with different groups to control specific interactions with biological samples, all while maintaining a large quantum yield that is required for the probes to be bright. The nanocrystals had narrow, tunable, symmetric emission spectra, and the resulting biological quantum dots enabled color-coded identification of multiple cell structures for many biomedical applications. Following the initial discovery, it was important for these materials to be made available to as many biomedical researchers as possible. This was achieved through the founding of Quantum Dot Corporation (QDC).

This biotechnology company used quantum dot synthesis and know-how to enable color-coded identification of multiple cell structures. The Qdot innovations became commercially available in 2002. With more than 200 Qdot-based products sold in more than 160 countries, today they are benefiting millions of people worldwide. They are deployed for many biomedical diagnostic needs, especially for the analysis of tumors in pathology laboratories and also for optimizing biological processes for sustainable crops and for diagnosing plant and animal disease.

These applications reduce the use of fertilizer, pesticides and water, and improve plant and animal breeding. Current human applications include clinical treatment and public health protection, such as disease detection and surveillance, newborn screening, and food safety assays. This talk will also feature some discussion of the future challenges in improving the science of making precision nanocrystals and the many prospects for further technology applications that may benefit humanity.

incl. 5 minutes for Q&A from audience

Repurposing the Blueprint of Life through Spherical Nucleic Acids (SNAs): Opening the Field of Structural Nanomedicine
Spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) are nanostructures defined bya densely packed, radiallyoriented arrangement of nucleic acids on the surface of a nanoparticle core. These structures have transformedlarge swaths of the field of molecular diagnostics and are now the basis for commercial tools that allow one to detect a wide range of bacteria, viruses, and other infectious disease markers in clinical samples. SNAs are distinct from other forms of nucleic acids, have no natural counterparts, and exhibit unique interactions with biological systems. These structural properties facilitate efficient cellular uptake, positioning them as potent tools forgene regulation, vaccine development, and gene editing. Indeed, they are now the basis for lead compounds that are being explored in the clinic for the treatment of diseases likeglioblastoma, Merkel cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, psoriasis, and several neurological disorders. The modularity of the SNA architecture has opened the field of structural nanomedicine, where nanomedicines are defined not just by the identity of the active components but also by their structural arrangement and chemical connectivity.The power of this approach has been demonstrated in the design and synthesis of very potent SNA vaccines formultiple forms of cancer and infectious disease. Collectively, these advancesrepresent over three decades of progress in nanomedicine and underscore the transformative effect SNAs have had in how diseases are understood, tracked, and treated and highlight the impact of SNAs on science and society.