Xu Lab

About the Lab

Children with cancer and life-threatening genetic diseases deserve therapies that are precise, safe, and designed for them from the start, not scaled down from adult medicine. The Xu Lab builds AI-driven lipid nanoparticle platforms that deliver nucleic acid medicines directly to pediatric cancer and rare disease. We work at the intersection of three disciplines that rarely sit in one lab: lipid chemistry, machine learning, and high-throughput automated biology. Combinatorial ionizable-lipid libraries, synthesized on self-driving laboratory platforms, generate the large standardized structure-activity datasets that predictive models need; those models in turn propose the next generation of carriers. The result is a closed design-synthesize-test loop that shortens the path from a chemical idea to a candidate with defined organ tropism. We take organ-targeted carriers out of the discovery loop and into preclinical gene therapeutics for pediatric cancer and rare disease, so that children and their families have real options sooner. Our lab works to overcome longstanding delivery bottlenecks in translational nanomedicine and to create safer, more precise therapeutic options for pediatric cancer and genetic disease. Lipid nanoparticle engineering involves combinatorial ionizable-lipid libraries built on automated, high-throughput platforms. AI for drug delivery relies on foundation models trained on those datasets to discover and optimize carriers with tunable organ tropism. Gene therapeutics focuses on translating targeted carriers into in vivo nucleic acid medicines against pediatric tumors and rare disease.