Celebrating CELT Scientists
Posted on: 14 March 2025 by Rebecca Derrick in Developing the Long-acting Pipeline
14 March is not only Albert Einstein’s birthday but also Celebrate Scientists Day and we're also in the middle of British Science Week. You may not know how many types of scientists we need within the Centre of Excellence for Long-acting Therapeutics (CELT), so what better time to tell you and celebrate them all.
CELT work hard to create long-acting versions of medicines that often use drug compounds that are already available. There are many illnesses that are preventable or treatable using safe medicines that we know work. However, the drug regimen required to treat or prevent many of these illnesses creates a high burden for patients’ lives, which leads to low adherence.
Within our team of 50+ staff, most of us are scientists and it turns out there are a lot of different disciplines necessary to do what we do.
Materials Chemists
There are many areas of chemistry involved in our work, and therefore the discussion around the different types of chemists in CELT gets complicated quickly. The most helpful catchall term for CELT’s chemistry team is “materials chemistry”.
Our materials chemists all contribute to the numerous processes and studies that turn poorly water-soluble drug compounds into long-acting medicines. The difficulty here is that the main vehicle that carries drugs around the human body is water-based. We make very small drug particles, sometimes in the nanoscale (less than 100th the width of a human hair), that are stabilised by water-soluble materials. This allows the drug to be administered in the form of a reservoir that allows a long and slow delivery into the bloodstream, possibly over months. Any candidate medicine needs to be able to be manufactured on a large scale, must be stable for long periods while waiting to be used, and fully understood before regulators will approve them. The Materials Chemists start their work on a very small scale and screen thousands of possible formulations. These are whittled down and carefully optimised until only the most robust, reproducible, scale-able and stable options remain. Whether they deliver the benefits that we are looking for is then studied by other teams in CELT.
You can find out more specifics about our material chemists’ work on our Solid Drug Nanoparticles page.
Modellers (in silico team)
These scientists create tissues, organs and sometimes full patients out of data. Programming carefully curated algorithms, modellers use computer software to predict whether a new drug formulation will have enough exposure in the body to treat or prevent the disease. Modelling also allows us to understand how a drug will metabolise and be excreted from the body, which in turn helps predict how often a drug needs to be administered.
This work means we can start to understand early what formulations will be most effective. Modelling is key in helping us to avoid wasting resources running experiments on drugs that are unlikely to work, which aids our sustainability as a research centre.
For the International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2024, we wrote up an interview with two of our modellers, so if you’re interested to learn more about them, we recommend starting there.
We also wrote a World Tuberculosis Day 2024 blog that focused on some exciting news one of CELT’s modellers presented at the Conference for Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections that year.
In vitro team
In vitro scientists work in our laboratories with drugs and samples. This means the research is not in a living body, but could be tissue, cells or blood samples. Our in vitro work often involves drug assays, which are the assessment of the presence, functional activity or amount of a drug released. This helps us predict if a drug formulation will release drug particles from the SDN at the optimum rate for treatment or prevention of disease.
Some of CELT’s in vitro team work on polymerase chain reaction. This is how we rapidly generate lots of specific/known DNA or RNA sequences to identify if certain infectious diseases are present. In CELT this has included Sars-CoV2 virus in animal samples, such as lung tissue.
If you’d like to understand more about our work with samples, our National Blood Donor Day 2024 blog gives insight into how we utilise blood samples within CELT work.
In vivo team
When we have a lead formulation that has shown the optimal parameters in other tests, including modelling and in vitro, we progress through the in vivo process. This is the first time a drug will be tested in a living body and is necessary before we can continue to take a formulation to human clinical trial.
Government regulators require that medicines have been through animal trials before progressing to trials in humans. Within CELT, we generally use rats, mice, hamsters and occasionally rabbits. CELT’s in vivo team look after our animals, write study plans and carry out the study including administering the drug formulation, blood draws, and observing physical or behavioural changes after drug administration. Our in vivo team have personal licenses from the Home Office, and we hold a Home Office approved project licence. Our in vivo team undergo regular training for animal welfare, ethics and procedures so we know our animals are looked after to the highest standard whilst in our care.
Unnecessary animal research is illegal in the UK, so we make sure our experimental design is sound to avoid unnecessary repetition, and our in vitro scientists work on non-animal technologies where possible. We use the least number of animals possible and ensure we use those that have the lowest sentience and closest biology to the area the disease impacts.
The University of Liverpool are signed up to the Understanding Animal Research Openness Concordat. You can find out more about the University’s work with animals via the Animal Research at the University of Liverpool page.
Named Animal Care and Welfare Officers
University employed staff within the animal unit we work with are key to our research. We all work very hard to maintain the high standard of welfare for the animals in our care. This isn’t just because there are strict rules and regulations for animals in research, but because it is the right thing to do.
It is already against UK law to impose unnecessary pain, suffering and distress to animals in research, but the Named Animal Care and Welfare Officers are important in overseeing that aspect of our work, as well as holding all researchers who work with animals accountable.
Bioanalysts
Bioanalysts measure the amount of drug in both in vitro and in vivo samples, as well as develop and validate new drug assays. CELT’s Bioanalytical Hub oversee the development and validation of new assays, and work to understand any snags in an assay. The latter includes looking into any unexpected results from our research to understand if it’s an assay anomaly or if it’s that the drug does not work as expected. The Hub can also determine if the drug has entered the target tissues in the body, to ensure it is having an effect in the optimum places.
This is a key point in our journey as it means we can be certain before ceasing research with a particular drug formulation that it is in fact the drug itself producing the anomaly and not something unexpected within the research materials, such as excipients.
One of our bioanalysts presented exciting findings in our hepatitis C virus work at the 2024 Conference for Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. We concentrated on this for our World Hepatitis Day 2024 blog.
Immunologists and cell biologists
CELT’s Immunocompatibility group head our biocompatibility work. They work to understand how the body’s immune system will react to long-acting medications, this supports the translation of the drug to clinical use by helping us understand the human biology behind the medicines we make.
Our immunologists also work within CELT’s Nanotherapeutics Hub, which builds on local expertise in nanotherapeutics and provides links to UK and international partner organisations. There is a large variation in the compositional and physical characteristics of nanoparticles, which as explained above are key to our long-acting work. The Nanotherapeutics Hub works to provide a greater understanding of these variations to aid the development of long-acting methodologies in our industry.
To find out more, we wrote a World Immunology Day 2024 blog that goes into further details about immunology and its place within CELT that may be of interest.
Technicians
While many of the scientists in CELT work across more than one discipline, our technical staff work across all of them. Technical work in laboratories is often a shared process, but having specific technicians is important to make sure there is a holistic overview of lab use and that all the science has what it needs ready and available. Technicians are research staff and are heavily involved in the preparation and support of all our lab research.
Efficient technical services in laboratories helps research to run smoothly. It is also extremely important to CELT’s sustainability, as we highlighted in our Sustainability Week 2025 blog a few weeks ago.
Public Engagement
We currently have a staff member involved in stakeholder engagement and three more starting in the coming months, including one specifically for patient and public involvement and engagement. CELT have many stakeholders involved in our work and many others we want to engage in any products we create. This means our stakeholder engagement involves public engagement research as well. Our engagement activity sees us working with international researchers, policy makers, government officials, charities, medical providers, health care assistants, and the patients themselves.
Engagement research and work helps us know that patients want what we think they do, that providers and legislators are willing to provide what we make to those patients that need it, and that everything is ready from an official perspective for them to be able to do that.
CELT, like many organisations, is a sum of its parts. Science is the foundation of everything we do, but everyone’s incredibly hard and varied work all contributes towards the same goal of patient care and eradicating diseases. Without the varied nature of our team, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do in such an encompassing way and that is worth celebrating.
#CelebrateScientistsDay