Thesis Defense: Yuan Jia, Waymouth Lab

"Design and Evaluation of Polymeric Vectors for Nucleic Acid Delivery”

Nucleic acid medicines depend entirely on the vehicle that carries them, and the vehicles now in clinical use are limited in tropism, cell-type reach, and manufacturing complexity. Charge-altering releasable transporters are single-component oligomers whose cationic block rearranges to neutral byproducts after uptake, so cargo binding and release are separated in time by a schedule written into the backbone. This dissertation asks how far that design extends, applying the platform to gene silencing, RNA vaccination, and gene correction. A delivery vector is not a container but a molecule with a schedule.