Biomedical engineer uses viruslike particles to deliver genes

Samagya Banskota, a biomedical engineer at Boston University, is building viruslike particles that can deliver gene-editing tools directly into specific cells—without carrying genetic material that would make them infectious. Her team’s work has shown therapeu

At 36, Samagya Banskota carries a lesson she learned early in Nepal: doctors can change what a family lives through. Raised in a household of doctors. she grew up watching how medicine reshapes lives. and she has spent her career turning that idea into engineering—designing safer ways to get therapies to the places they need to work.

Today, Banskota is a biomedical engineer at Boston University. Her focus is ambitious and unusually precise: building viruslike particles that can deliver gene-editing technologies to cells. These engineered particles use protein structures that resemble those of viruses, allowing them to target specific cells in the body. But they are missing the genetic material that would make real viruses infectious.

That design choice is the key to how her team tries to avoid the tradeoffs that come with using actual viruses as delivery vehicles. By packaging gene-editing tools inside particles that look like viruses to the body. her approach aims to steer therapy toward the right cells while reducing concerns tied to infection.

Banskota and her colleagues also faced a major benchmark that’s harder than it sounds: proving the strategy works not just in petri dishes. but in living organisms at a therapeutic level. Other investigators had shown that viruslike particles could deliver gene-editing machinery to cells in laboratory settings. Banskota’s team. she says. were the first to successfully demonstrate the approach in living organisms—and to show functional results in mice with genetic blindness. In that work, the particles restored partial visual function.

“The proteins have the shortest half-life, so they go in, they do the job, and they just get destroyed within a few hours,” Banskota explains. “We don’t have to worry about any other side effects that may come from prolonged expressions of these systems.”

The logic is straightforward. even if the engineering isn’t: if the delivery system is built around proteins that act briefly. then the treatment’s effect can be timed and limited. It’s a different kind of safety promise—less about keeping something in the body for long periods. more about making sure it can’t linger.

Banskota’s team isn’t only thinking about gene editing. She notes that viruslike particles could be used to deliver therapies beyond genetic tools. Antibody drugs such as Herceptin, used for breast cancer, are lab-engineered proteins. But many diseases—including several cancers and neurological diseases—are driven by factors located inside cells. Those internal targets are difficult for antibody-style protein drugs to reach because such therapies work by targeting proteins on the outside of cells.

With a delivery system that is “so good for protein delivery,” Banskota says, “I think it opens up a whole new category of medicines for diseases that we potentially can treat.”

The sequence of the work—first designing viruslike particles without genetic material. then proving they can deliver gene-editing machinery in living animals. and finally tying the approach to protein-based medicines—points to a single goal: getting therapeutic payloads to the interior of cells without turning the delivery vehicle into a liability.

Samagya Banskota biomedical engineering Boston University viruslike particles gene editing gene-editing delivery targeted cells genetic blindness mice Herceptin antibody drugs protein delivery neurological diseases cancers