Dr Christos Tapeinos

Research focus

Most of what I work on comes back to a single problem: how to get a drug into tissue the body is built to protect. In the central nervous system that means the blood–brain barrier, which turns away all but a narrow class of molecules, and the diseases I return to most often are glioblastoma and neuroinflammation. My approach is to put the discrimination into the carrier itself — lipid, polymeric, cell-membrane-derived and stimuli-responsive nanoparticles that recognise a diseased microenvironment and change their behaviour in response to it, whether by releasing a payload, escaping an endosome, or crossing a barrier a conventional formulation cannot.

The same question takes a different form in pancreatic cancer, where the obstacle is not a cellular barrier but a dense fibrotic stroma that physically excludes nanoparticles. There I am less interested in pushing harder through the tissue than in reconfiguring it. Running alongside both is the measurement problem, which takes up as much of my time as the chemistry: fluidic models of the brain, and of skin, that behave enough like real tissue to show not only whether a particle works but why it does not.

I am a Co-Investigator in the HALo programme at the Centre of Excellence for Long-Acting Therapeutics, where I lead the skin-mimicking models used to study how long-acting formulations diffuse after subcutaneous administration. I came to Manchester in November 2022, after research positions at NCSR Demokritos in Athens, NUI Galway, the University of Chicago, the Italian Institute of Technology and the University of Helsinki — a route through biomaterials, nanotechnology and pharmaceutical sciences that still shapes how the lab is organised.

Joined

2022

Funding

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, Royal Society, EPSRC, Translation Manchester