Ken Yamada

Assistant Professor University of Massachusetts Medical School

Seminars

Tuesday 8th December 2026
Comparing Today’s Leading Extrahepatic Delivery Strategies & Building a Practical Framework for Your Own Program to Accelerate Clinical Translation

Interactive, case study-led workshop exploring how leading developers are overcoming the biological barriers limiting oligonucleotide delivery beyond the liver. Through realworld development examples and collaborative discussion, attendees will evaluate the trade-offs between emerging targeting platforms and leave with a practical framework for selecting the right delivery strategy for their own programmes.

Workshop highlights

  • Work through real-world case studies of extrahepatic and CNS delivery programmes to understand where promising approaches translated successfully and where they broke down between preclinical models and the clinic
  • Compare transferrin receptor conjugates, antibody shuttles, ligand-based targeting and non-conjugated approaches to determine which strategy is best suited to different tissues, indications and therapeutic modalities
  • Leave with a practical framework to identify whether delivery strategy, targeting ligand or oligonucleotide chemistry represents the greatest development risk in your programme and where to focus optimisation efforts first
Thursday 10th December 2026
Chemical Engineering of siRNA toward Modulating Endosomal Escape Kinetics
2:15 pm
  • Poly-dxC (exNA-dC) self-assembles into iMotif structures (ex-iM) specifically under the acidic pH condition
  • Poly-dxC-modified siRNA self-assembles within the cell in vitro, enhancing the kinetics of siRNA activity without inducing toxic endosomal membrane rupture
  • Poly-dxC-modified siRNA improves gene-silencing kinetics in vivo, with substantially enhanced early-time-point silencing in mouse kidney
Ken