Lucia Lombardi on engineering peptide-based drugs to treat neurological diseases

Описание: Lucia Lombardi is a peptide specialist and Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at Queen's University Belfast (QUB). With her team, Lucia synthesises and characterises peptides for healthcare applications. Ultimately, she would like to combine her expertise with that of synthetic cell researchers to develop a synthetic tool for delivering drugs to hard-to-reach parts of the body, such as the brain, to treat neurological diseases.

In the video, she talks about her research work on peptides, her interest in synthetic cells and the technological potential she sees in them, her personal reasons for wanting to find a treatment for neurological diseases, and the collaboration she hopes to have not only with researchers but also with companies in the years to come.

0:25: Could you give a brief overview of your research
1:04: Why are you interested in synthetic cells?
2:48: What future collaborations do you wish to have

Video prepared by Erin Spence, Digital Support Officer, School of Biological Sciences QUB.

This video was made possible thanks to the support of the School of Biological Sciences and the Institute for Global Food Security (IGFS)

Useful links:
The Institute for Global Food Security: https://www.qub.ac.uk/Research/GRI/Th...
School of Biological Sciences: https://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/Schoolo...
Queen's University Belfast: https://www.qub.ac.uk/
More video interviews with researchers from the SynCellEU community: https://syntheticcell.eu/category/video/
Imperial College London: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/
Lilly: https://www.lilly.com/

Image references:

Image 1: Peptide-based therapeutics
Ref: Lucia Lombardi, Luke A. Granger, Robin J. Shattock, and Daryl R. Williams, Advancements in Loop Cyclization Approaches for Enhanced Peptide Therapeutics for Targeting Protein–Protein Interactions, The Journal of Organic Chemistry 2025 90 (4), 1467-1477, DOI: 10.1021/acs.joc.4c02178

Image 2: Antimicrobial peptide biomaterials that kill bacteria by breaking down their membranes
Ref: Lucia Lombardi, Jiaxu Li, and Daryl R. Williams. 2024. "Peptide-Based Biomaterials for Combatting Infections and Improving Drug Delivery" Pharmaceutics 16, no. 11: 1468. https://doi.org/10.3390/pharmaceutics...