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Sjoberg, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Sjoberg, M..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Time Resolved Inspection of Ionizable-Lipid Facilitated Lipid Nanoparticle Disintegration and Cargo Release at an Endosomal Membrane Mimic

This study investigates pH-triggered fusion dynamics of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) with an endosomal membrane mimic, addressing mechanistic aspects of a crucial yet elusive process for effective mRNA delivery. Utilizing time-resolved total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) imaging, we observed a delayed onset of LNP fusion upon pH drop, lasting seconds to minutes depending on pH and LNP size. Once initiated, LNP fusion and cargo escape occurred rapidly within tens to hundreds of milliseconds. While LNP disintegration is observed to lead to release of a significant portion of mRNA into the acidic environment, some mRNA molecules remained mobile on the endosomal membrane mimic due to deprotonation-resistant complex salt formation. Comparison of the fusion efficiency of two LNP formulations correlated with protein translation in human primary cell transfection data, emphasizing the importance of biophysical investigations in understanding ionizable-lipid-containing LNP-assisted mRNA delivery mechanisms and providing insights for optimizing mRNA-LNP design for enhanced endosomal escape.

biophysics↗

Simulation based benchmarking of isoform quantification in single-cell RNA-seq

Single-cell RNA-seq has the potential to facilitate isoform quantification as the confounding factor of a mixed population of cells is eliminated. We carried out a benchmark for five popular isoform quantification tools. Performance was generally good when run on simulated data based on SMARTer and SMART-seq2 data, but was poor for simulated Drop-seq data. Importantly, the reduction in performance for single-cell RNA-seq compared with bulk RNA-seq was small. An important biological insight comes from our analysis of real data which showed that genes that express two isoforms in bulk RNA-seq predominantly express one or neither isoform in individual cells.

bioinformatics↗

A screen for combination therapies in BRAF/NRAS wild type melanoma identifies nilotinib plus MEK inhibitor as a synergistic combination

Despite recent therapeutic advances in the management of BRAFV600-mutant melanoma, there is still a compelling need for more effective treatments for patients who developed BRAF/NRAS wild type disease. Since the activity of single targeted agents is limited by innate and acquired resistance, we performed a high-throughput drug screen using 180 drug combinations to generate over 18,000 viability curves, with the aim of identifying agents that synergise to kill BRAF/NRAS wild type melanoma cells. From this screen we observed strong synergy between the tyrosine kinase inhibitor nilotinib and MEK inhibitors and validated this combination in an independent cell line collection. We found that AXL expression was associated with synergy to the nilotinib/MEK inhibitor combination, and that both drugs work in concert to suppress pERK. This finding was supported by genome-wide CRISPR screening which revealed that resistance mechanisms converge on regulators of the MAPK pathway. Finally, we validated the synergy of nilotinib/trametinib combination in vivo using patient-derived xenografts. Our results indicate that a nilotinib/MEK inhibitor combination may represent an effective therapy in BRAF/NRAS wild type melanoma patients.

cancer biology↗