A celebration of the contributions of professor Pieter Cullis to the fields of membrane biophysics, nanotechnology and nanomedicine

It is my great pleasure to serve as a guest editor for a special edition of the Journal of Drug Targeting that celebrates the achievements of my friend and colleague Professor Pieter Cullis. Pieter is currently a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Head of the Nanomedicine Research Group at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He is also the Director of the Life Sciences Institute (LSI) at UBC where he takes a leadership role in encouraging and enabling the LSI researchers at all levels, in their world-leading basic life science and translational research. In this role, he is also spearheading a personalized medicine initiative for the Province of British Columbia.

I first met Pieter in the late 1970’s when he and I were both researchers in the field of membrane biophysics, studying the role of lipids in membranes. This was in an era when the community was focused on using lipid membranes as models for understanding the structure and function of cell membranes. At that time, Pieter’s biophysical research on lipids that assume non-bilayer structures was attracting a lot of attention in the field. The seminal importance of this research has proven itself over and over again in such diverse areas as membrane fusion, liposomal drug trapping and release, and delivery of nuclei acids into cells.

In more recent years, his activities have evolved towards the use of lipids in delivery systems for the delivery of small molecule therapeutics, and he turned out to have a remarkable entrepreneurial talent for founding companies to take advantage of basic life science discoveries in his laboratory and translation to the clinic. These include Inex Pharmaceuticals (now Arbutus BioPharma), which brought products like Myocet (liposomal doxorobucin) and Marquibo (liposomal vincristine) to market, and Northern Lipids, and Precision Nanosystems that have developed innovative technologies to help in the production, drug loading and scale-up of nanoparticulate delivery systems (Lipex extruder, NanoAssemblr Platform) that are used around the world.

His most recent research endeavours have focussed on the difficult challenge of delivering nuclei acids into cells, and translation of his discoveries into the clinic. The new non-bilayer forming lipids he developed and the solid core lipidic nanoparticle delivery systems containing these novel lipids have been at the core of products that are in late phase clinical trials at Alnylam for a number of indications and will almost certainly result in the first RNAi formulations to come to market.

Concern for the training and eventual careers of Pieter’s graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and other employees has always been a major focus of his, and his former students form an impressive network of senior scientists, entrepreneurs and executives around the world. As part of this reach-out, Pieter and I were co-founders of the Centre for Drug Research and Development, and he served as its Scientific Director for 5 years. CDRD is a national organisation with international partners that helps to translate promising health research to the clinic, providing employment for over 100 researchers and trainees while also producing scores of highly qualified personnel in the field of drug development. Many of Pieter’s former students and colleagues have found employment in the several companies that he has founded and, under his mentorship, they, themselves, are achieving career success.

It has been a pleasure for me to count myself among Pieter Cullis’ friends and colleagues for the last almost four decades and to see the field of drug delivery move from the early days of Alec Bangham and Gregory Gregoriadis and the many others who described the first liposomes and drug delivery systems, to the present day, with a dozen or more products are in the clinic, and several more on the way. I’m pleased that Pieter and I were able to collaborate in many ways over the years, and that this resulted in two top-cited review papers [1,2], which can be consulted for more information on the history of, and products resulting from, the many individuals and teams working the field of drug delivery.

With this special issue of the Journal of Drug Targeting comes my very best wishes to Pieter Cullis, and to all of the authors whose excellent work is profiled in this issue, for continued friendship, collegiality, and for many more excellent contributions to progressing the field of drug delivery.