BURST
Dr. Kathryn Whitehead wasn’t looking to leave Pittsburgh.
The Carnegie Mellon University professor had built a career studying lipid nanoparticles — microscopic fat particles that can carry medicines into the body — and was happy at Carnegie Mellon University , where she was doing research aimed at developing better ways to deliver drugs inside the body.
Then a UBC colleague reached out with an unexpected proposition: Would she be interested in moving to Canada as part of a new federal program designed to lure some of the world’s top researchers to the country?
“I was very skeptical at this point in time,” Whitehead said in a phone interview from Pennsylvania. “I wasn’t looking to move.”
Eight months later, Whitehead is one of 64 researchers named an Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada — and one of nine coming to UBC — in the first intake of a $1.7-billion federal initiative to attract top research talent to the country.
Over 12 years, the ambitious federal program aims to support more than 1,000 researchers — up to 100 established scientists for the research chair positions, but also early-career researchers and doctoral and post-doctoral students — in field identified by the federal government as priorities, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, biotechnology, and defence.
Industry Minister Melanie Joly is expected to be at an event at the University of B.C. today to announce the first round of research chairs.
The UBC recruits were poached from top universities in the U.S., including Dr. Peter Caravan from Harvard Medical School, named the research chair in translational molecular imaging; Dr. Daniel Kreiss, named chair in democratic communication coming from the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Dr. Crystal Kolden, chair in wildfire resilience who will join UBC Okanagan from the University of California next month.
Whitehead, who will join UBC’s faculty of applied science next July, specializes in the study of lipid nanoparticle drug delivery, a field that gained prominence since its use in the delivery of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
At UBC, she will join a research community with deep roots in her field. Among its pioneers is Pieter Cullis , a professor in UBC’s biochemistry and molecular biology department whose work on lipid nanoparticles helped establish the technology used to deliver mRNA.
Cullis’ research helped spawn an ecosystem unique in the world, said Whitehead — a network of researchers and startup companies, with connections to hospitals and health care that help get new therapies into patients.
“The types of resources available really are unparalleled for the work that I do,” she said. “I’ll be able to take my career to a different level because of the different types of resources that will be available to me and opportunities I wouldn’t necessarily have here.”
A major challenge in the field is getting promising medicines to the parts of the body where they are needed most. Most lipid nanoparticles tend to accumulate in the liver, limiting their ability to deliver drugs to other tissues or organs.
Whitehead’s research focuses on designing and testing new lipids to understand which chemical properties can steer nanoparticles toward specific tissues.
She also wants to explore a largely overlooked question in drug delivery: Why does the same medicine can work differently depending on a person’s sex, hormonal state or stage of life?
Her work will examine how factors such as pregnancy, breastfeeding and menopause affect drug delivery, with the goal of developing treatments that work better for women.