Lipid-Free Cell Delivery System Wins ELRIG Drug Discovery Innovation Award
PartitionBio’s cell delivery system could contribute to making genetic medicines cheaper and more accessible.
Published: October 22, 2025
Original: https://www.technologynetworks.com/drug-discovery/blog/lipid-free-cell-delivery-system-wins-elrig-drug-discovery-2025-innovation-award-405895
Blake Forman speaking with Zehra F. Nizami, PhD & Olaf Piepenburg, PhD
This year, the Breakthrough Zone returned to the European Laboratory Research and Innovation Group (ELRIG) Drug Discovery 2025 event. Designed to support startups in biotech and drug discovery, the Breakthrough Zone invites companies of less than 25 full-time employees and/or with a turnover of less than £2.5 million to showcase their innovations.
As part of their participation in the Breakthrough Zone, startups were invited to submit a 3-minute video explaining the challenges their technology is working to solve and the innovations behind their solution to be in with the chance of winning ELRIG’s coveted Innovation Award.
At this year’s ELRIG Drug Discovery event, held in Liverpool, UK, the Innovation Award was presented to PartitionBio, the biotechnology startup behind a new droplet-based cell delivery system for biological cargos.
Technology Networks had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Olaf Piepenburg, managing director at PartitionBio, and Dr. Zehra Nizami, principal scientist and head of business development and strategic partnerships at PartitionBio, to discuss its award-winning innovations and learn more about its mission.
Blake Forman (BF): For those not familiar with your work, could you explain the broad aims of PartitionBio’s technology?
Zehra F. Nizami, PhD (ZFN): We’ve been working on a new kind of cell delivery technology that utilizes the principles of liquid-liquid phase separations. This is a process that happens naturally in cells to form membraneless organelles. It occurs when biopolymers, such as proteins, under the right conditions, separate into two different phases in a liquid solution.At PartitionBio, we’ve scaled this concept into a usable form. We’ve created large libraries of peptides that are short, synthetically scalable and have this ability to separate into different phases in a liquid. We can utilize this property to load biological cargos such as DNA and RNA. In this way, we’re able to effectively deliver a new class of particles into cells. These particles are not nanoparticles or lipid-based and so offer a completely new paradigm of transfection. We’ve launched our first product, BubbleFect, as research use only so people can try this technology and explore potential therapeutic applications.
BF: How does this technology stand to impact the field of genetic medicine? Are there any specific challenges your technology is aiming to solve?
Olaf Piepenburg, PhD (OP): We’ve positioned our droplet-based cell delivery system as a life science tool to work in tissue culture, but our long-term goal is to make it available for developers of in vivo treatments for the delivery of genetic medicines. Currently, genetic medicines are delivered using biological agents, such as adeno-associated virus or using lipid-based reagents such as lipid nanoparticles (LNPs). Both these methods have biosafety drawbacks with potential genetic side effects. We hope that our delivery method, which is fundamentally different and based on peptides, rather than lipids or viruses, can overcome these challenges.
ZFN: One of the goals of making BubbleFect available as a research tool was to engage with all these different application areas and make it available to leaders in these areas. Researchers who use our system can benefit from the reagent being easy to formulate and synthetically scalable. They are also room temperature stable, so there’s no cold chain distribution required. The fact that they’re disordered could also be very interesting for redosing.
Are there any exciting case studies using this technology that you can share with us?
ZFN: We launched an alpha program in June of this year to encourage customers to try our BubbleFect product. This program has over 50 participants in around 9 different countries, but primarily across Europe and the US. From this, we’ve discovered new things by having access to different kinds of cell lines.For example, we learned that we could transfect human pancreatic cells, human induced pluripotent stem cells and human adipocytes, which can be notoriously difficult to transfect. People have been testing a range of cargos and have demonstrated applying CRISPR in a high-throughput screening environment. From this program, we’ve observed a lot of great use cases.