Dr Arpan Desai

Arpan is Managing Director of Nanovation Therapeutics, he has over a decade of experience leading project and platform initiatives in the RNA therapeutics space. He has a track record of creating innovative delivery approaches and progressing LNP-based projects from discovery into the clinic across multiple therapeutic areas. Before joining Nanovation he served as a director at AstraZeneca, where he was been involved in leading projects and platform initiatives related to ASOs, anti-miRNA, mRNA for gene editing, vaccines and protein replacement. This has included playing key roles in collaborations with Moderna, Ionis, VaxEquity and Regulus. He established and led a global matrix team of RNA delivery scientists with the mission of creating new delivery technologies for mRNA. He established key infrastructure for the design and optimization of LNPs. Moreover, several key advances in LNP platform science were obtained, such as the development of a proteomic based screening method for in vivo LNP assessment, evaluation of higher throughput methods for DMTA of LNPs and evaluation of almost 100 external technologies to name a few. His work on understanding how LNPs interact with different tumour cells facilitated the selection of preclinical models to assess LNP performance. This ultimately resulted in AZs first LNP based mRNA project progressing to the clinic – MEDI1191 (partnered with Moderna Therapeutics).