King's College London

Driton, your research involves the delivery of "challenging drugs" through non-injection means. Could you tell us about your background and how your interest in this field began?

I’ve been with the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science in Waterloo for eight years now. My journey actually started in clinical practice; I’m a pharmacist by training and spent my registration year working in a hospital. While I loved the clinical side, I "fell in love with research" during my degree at Nottingham and eventually returned there for my PhD. Before joining King’s, I worked as a postdoc at Nottingham and held an academic position at the University of Lincoln. Throughout my career, the objective has remained consistent: delivering complex drugs like insulin or RNA through more convenient, non-injection routes—predominantly orally.

Delivering complex drugs orally sounds like a significant hurdle. Why is it so difficult to move away from injections for treatments like insulin or the newer RNA therapies?

The challenge lies in the complexity of the molecules and our biological barriers. Unlike conventional drugs like ibuprofen, molecules like insulin, RNA, or DNA are three-dimensional and highly sensitive. If you take them orally, the acid in the stomach destroys them almost immediately. Furthermore, our guts are naturally designed to prevent large molecules or particles from entering the bloodstream. In the past, researchers tried to "break open" the gut wall temporarily using permeability enhancers, but that carries safety risks. We shifted our focus to identifying a "carrier" that could encapsulate the drug and transport it safely across the intestinal barrier.

This is where the research takes an interesting turn toward the dairy aisle. How did the "sparking idea" of using milk-derived particles come to you?

It was actually a "sparking idea" triggered by research in the field of nutrition several years ago. We noticed research into particles in milk called extracellular vesicles (EVs), which were reported to resist digestion and enter the bloodstream. At the time, I didn't have a clue what they were, but we since learnt about the properties and capabilities. We confirmed that these nanometer-sized particles, similar in dimension to viruses, are exceptionally good at crossing the gut wall and therefore we envisioned that these natural particles could potentially be used as delivery systems to facilitate the uptake of certain drugs across the gut barrier.

Milk is an abundant, cheap resource. Currently, RNA drugs use "lipid nanoparticles"—the same technology found in COVID vaccines—which are expensive, patented, and can cause immune reactions, in addition to not being effective for oral administration. Our vision is that these milk-derived vesicles could potentially replace those lipids with a delivery system that is simpler, cheaper, and more widely available.

You recently participated in the Sanofi i-Awards through the King’s Industry Research Partnerships Office (IRPO). How did this lead to your recent £2.5 million grant success?

The Sanofi i-Award was the critical turning point. It is a unique scheme where King’s is one of only two UK institutions invited to participate because we are recognised as world leaders in research areas like immunology. Working with Rachel Parker from the King’s Innovation Catalyst’s Industry Research Partnerships Office was vital, as the office helps facilitate industry connections that make research move faster.

Sanofi uses this award to fund "high-risk, high-gain" ideas that might not have strong research data yet. It provided the funding to generate the preliminary pilot data that simply didn't exist before. Without the i-Award, I would not have been able to attract the £2.5 million UKRI funding to push the technology further. The award gave us the funding to prove the concept and provided a year of "continued attention" from industrial partners who challenged us with "industrial" questions: Is it scalable? What is the cost? Who are the customers?

What has been the long-term impact of this translational journey for your research at King's?

The impact has been transformative for the project's viability. While the collaboration with Sanofi was a one-year project, the platform it provided was critical to enable us to attract the bigger grant that will fund the next several years of development.

We are now focused on refining the process of isolating these vesicles from a cheap and widely available resource, i.e. milk bought at a supermarket, to ensure the process is viable for mass production. For those of us doing translational research, having these mechanisms to collaborate with industry is fantastic because it bridges the gap between basic science and commercial reality. The goal is to provide a future where a patient can swap an unpleasant injection for a convenient, safe and accessible oral alternative.