Event Recap: Therapeutics for the Future

On May 9, 2023, Gairdner in partnership with Life Sciences BC and sponsored by TELUS Health hosted a Global Perspectives Panel featuring a keynote from 2022 Gairdner Awards laureate Dr. Pieter Cullis and a panel discussion with Drs. James Taylor (Precision NanoSystems), Sherie Duncan (AbCellera) and Thomas Madden (Acuitas Therapeutics), moderated by Tiffany Chiu (AbCellera).

The future of medicine is here. Recently thrust into the global spotlight after forty years in the making, the tiny bubbles of fat known as lipid nanoparticles are what protects and delivers the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Without them, there would be no mRNA vaccine, let alone one so effective that shocked the scientific community.

And it doesn't end there. This breakthrough provided a glimpse of the promise and impact that gene therapy medicine, enabled by the technology of lipid nanoparticles, has for human health. Touted as the next generation of medicine, gene therapy has the potential to revolutionize treatment and dramatically improve quality of life by targeting the underlying cause of a genetic disease.