Blake Lash
News Type
Delivering the future of medicine
Historically, Lash has investigated therapeutic treatments like CRISPR gene editing technologies and corrections for mutations.
“We have lots of cool tools for various treatments, but how do we apply them? We need to deliver the tool to where it needs to work,” he explains.
Cough syrup applied to a knee won’t cure a scratchy throat, after all; to be effective, medicine needs to reach the correct bit of anatomy, in the correct dosage, in the correct form, at the right time. And that is the focus of Lash’s PhD research: finessing delivery systems for various therapies. Lash and colleagues are developing modular delivery systems that can carry diverse therapeutic cargo and precisely target specific areas of the body.
This is a task much more easily described than achieved. Getting a therapeutic delivery system to work in a petri dish, a millimeter from its destination, is degrees of magnitude easier than injecting a vaccine into a human arm and knowing its payload will reach the relevant biological system or area.
Lash explains that his current work is drawing inspiration from lipid nanoparticles, the same kind of groundbreaking delivery technology used by Covid-19 vaccines, a fairly recent breakthrough in the field.
In his own way, Lash has always worked on delivery systems. As an undergrad at Georgia Tech, he worked with polymers and nanoparticles, developing particle systems that would break through a particularly tricky layer of mucus in human lungs.
Following graduation, he spent a year in Australia on a fellowship, working on yet another delivery problem: engineering proteins to deliver themselves.
“That was much more about tissue engineering, the regenerative side,” he says.
Lash moved from Australia to MIT to pursue his PhD in biological engineering.
“If you asked me at the end of undergrad if I’d be here? No idea,” he says. “You go where things are interesting.”
The Tampa, Florida, native grew up fascinated with the weather.
“My parents always bring up a childhood video. I was a little kid, pretending to be a meteorologist on TV, saying ‘It’s a tropical storm!’” he says.
In high school, a biology class shifted his focus to plants, thanks to a plant-obsessed teacher, Lash explains. “He transformed bacteria to make it green. Nowadays, that is simple and takes just 20 minutes on a Monday afternoon, but back then, it was something!”
Lash still keeps his green thumb in shape as a hobbyist cultivator at home. “I grow a ton of coleus. I like how full and colorful they are. They get big and fluffy, and they are very satisfying plants,” he adds.
For his next steps, Lash is staying curious. “I’m always going to ask new questions! It’s time to start learning new things,” he says.
