Project Grant R01HL188001

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute awarded $799,998 to The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania on August 12, 2026, under the Cardiovascular Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.837) to develop cardiotropic solid lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) as a drug and biologic delivery platform for cardiac therapeutics.

The research focuses on engineering and understanding heart-targeting LNPs that accumulate in cardiac tissue at significantly higher concentrations than existing drug delivery systems. The project pursues two specific aims: identifying new ligands for cardiac drug delivery through proteomics and affinity retrieval to characterize blood constituents and myocardial targets that enable LNP binding and transfer, and demonstrating efficacy of RNA therapeutic delivery to cardiomyocytes by using heart-targeting LNPs to modulate myocardial protein expression and contractility. The work builds on preliminary findings showing cardiac uptake of 40 percent of injected dose per gram in apoE-deficient mice, exceeding uptake of heart-tropic viral vectors by an order of magnitude, and demonstrating similar uptake achievable in wild-type mice through formulation optimization.

Work is performed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The award period runs through May 31, 2030. This is a project grant, the standard NIH research investigator-initiated award vehicle under the NHLBI competitive research portfolio.