Nucleic Acid Therapeutics: Successes, Milestones, and Upcoming Innovation

I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the lab of Prof. Anastasia Khvorova at the RNA Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan Medical School. My research focuses on improving the extra-hepatic delivery of siRNA therapeutics using self-assembled nucleic acid particles and specific protein-binding conjugates. I am particularly interested in applying this research to the treatment of oncology, muscle diseases, and CNS disorders.
I received my B.Sc. in premedical chemistry from the American University of Beirut in 2016 and my Ph.D. in chemistry from McGill University in 2021. My Ph.D. work focused on developing DNA nanocarriers for nucleic acid therapeutics. I designed and tested DNA-based nanocarriers with characteristics that enable them to move faster into clinical trials, such as improved cost-effectiveness, biocompatibility, specificity, and stability. The work resulted in the development of sequence-controlled nucleic acid-polymer conjugates that assemble into spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) with stimuli-responsive activation, as well as chemically modified SNAs that show promising efficacy without transfection agents.

Some of this work has been recognized by the OTS community, where I have received several awards for my research, including the Dr. Alan Gewirtz Memorial Scholarship for Graduate Students in 2021. I have also been actively involved with the OTS Society since 2020. I have helped host many of the OTS monthly webinars and served as a trainee representative on the board for the 2022-2024 term. In 2022, I hosted the next-generation session in Phoenix and co-led the establishment of the first official cohort of the OTS Mentorship Program, which is now a fixed yearly offering with an annual budget to support mentees in attending the annual meeting and other mentorship events.

Jillian is a fourth year MD/PhD student in Anastasia Khvorova’s Lab at UMass Chan Medical School. Jillian grew up in Massachusetts and received her Bachelor’s in Cellular Neuroscience from Colgate University in 2017. At Colgate, she worked in Dr. Jun Yoshino’s lab studying microglial contributions to neuroinflammation in Major Depression Disorder. Following graduation, Jillian was a post-baccalaureate researcher in Dr. R. Douglas Fields’ lab at the NIH’s NICHD investigating white matter development focused on oligodendrocyte contributions to Gulf War Illness and Hereditary Spastic Paralgesia. Between her experience at Colgate and at the NIH, seeing researchers and clinicians develop and investigate new therapeutics for neurological and developmental diseases, she was motivated to pursue an MD/PhD and matriculated into the MSTP at UMass Chan in 2019 and subsequently joined the Khvorova lab in 2021. In the lab, her work aims to develop novel oligonucleotide therapeutics to control and understand somatic repeat expansion in Huntington’s disease and related trinucleotide expansion disorders. Jillian uses multiple mouse models of Huntington’s Disease and chemically modified siRNA and ASOs to study impact of disrupting expression of proteins that facilitate the somatic expansion of the CAG locus. She hopes to use this work in nucleic acid therapeutics to develop therapies for neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders in the future. Outside the lab, Jillian loves to run and workout, bake, go to concerts, and spend time with friends, family, and pets