Piotr Kowalski
Biography
Dr. Kowalski is an Associate Professor in advanced therapies at the School of Pharmacy, University College Cork, and a Funded Investigator at the APC Microbiome Ireland. He earned his Ph.D. in 2014 from the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) which focused on the development of lipid-based systems for tissue selective delivery of siRNA. He received his postdoctoral training at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the laboratories of Prof. Daniel Anderson and Prof. Robert Langer. His multidisciplinary research focused on engineering novel biomaterials to enable the delivery of messenger RNAs to treat inflammatory diseases, cancer, and diabetes. Dr. Kowalski’s work resulted in a number of high-impact publications, several patents on RNA delivery technologies, and the creation of a US-based biotech startup (Orna therapeutics). His research at UCC is centered on developing Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products, in particular, novel clinically relevant drug delivery technologies for parental and non-parental applications, to facilitate effective nucleic acid-based therapies aimed at high medical need diseases that lack effective treatment. Dr. Kowalski has recently won a prestigious European Research Council Starting grant to develop a new class of circular RNA therapeutics and is a member of the GENEGUT consortium amining to create first-in-class oral RNA therapy. Currently, his group investigates the therapeutic potential of RNA molecules, including short interfering RNAs, messenger RNAs and circular RNAs, to treat diseases such as sepsis, inflammatory bowel disease, and cancer and develops methods to deliver these RNA-based drugs to diseased cells.