Changing genes

Hello Quartz readers,

Chances are, you’ve never heard of Pieter Cullis. But if you received the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, you have him, in part, to thank. Cullis is a biochemist at the University of British Columbia who has dedicated more than four decades of his life to figuring out how to package and deliver the building blocks of genetic code inside a tiny, specialized particle to help treat or prevent diseases.

One of Cullis’ biggest achievements came in 2018, when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Onpattro, a drug for a rare genetic disease. Onpattro quiets the problematic gene responsible for the condition, and to get where it needs to go in the body, it’s packaged in a lipid nanoparticle that originated in the lab of Cullis’ company, Acuitas.

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