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):
Senior Science Writer
Technology Networks
Blake pens and edits breaking news, articles and features on a broad range of scientific topics with a focus on drug discovery and biopharma. He earned an honors degree in chemistry from the University of Surrey. Blake also holds an MSc in chemistry from the University of Southampton. His research project focused on the synthesis of novel fluorescent dyes often used as chemical/bio-sensors and as photosensitizers in photodynamic therapy.
For those not familiar with your work, could you explain the broad aims of PartitionBio’s technology?
Principal Scientist, Head of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships
PartitionBio
As Head of Business Development and Scientific Partnerships at PartitionBio, Dr. Zehra Nizami leads external strategy, early access programs and partnerships to advance the company’s proprietary non-viral delivery platform, BubbleFect, toward R&D, preclinical and future clinical use. She also continues on as a principal scientist, undertaking R&D with her peers at PartitionBio as part of a collaborative team united by curiosity and discovery.
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.
Senior Science Writer
Technology Networks
Blake pens and edits breaking news, articles and features on a broad range of scientific topics with a focus on drug discovery and biopharma. He earned an honors degree in chemistry from the University of Surrey. Blake also holds an MSc in chemistry from the University of Southampton. His research project focused on the synthesis of novel fluorescent dyes often used as chemical/bio-sensors and as photosensitizers in photodynamic therapy.
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):
Managing Director
PartitionBio
Dr Olaf Piepenburg has been managing director of PartitionBio since 2022. Between 2003 and 2018 he worked with Niall Armes as chief scientific officer of TwistDx Ltd on the development and commercialization of the recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) technology. Following his involvement with TwistDx, Pipenburg worked in senior positions in the private biotechnology sector (head of sequencing biochemistry at Base4 Ltd, head of molecular development at SenseBio Ltd), before joining the Scientific Operations department at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK as head of research.
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:
Principal Scientist, Head of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships
PartitionBio
As Head of Business Development and Scientific Partnerships at PartitionBio, Dr. Zehra Nizami leads external strategy, early access programs and partnerships to advance the company’s proprietary non-viral delivery platform, BubbleFect, toward R&D, preclinical and future clinical use. She also continues on as a principal scientist, undertaking R&D with her peers at PartitionBio as part of a collaborative team united by curiosity and discovery.
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.
BF:
Senior Science Writer
Technology Networks
Blake pens and edits breaking news, articles and features on a broad range of scientific topics with a focus on drug discovery and biopharma. He earned an honors degree in chemistry from the University of Surrey. Blake also holds an MSc in chemistry from the University of Southampton. His research project focused on the synthesis of novel fluorescent dyes often used as chemical/bio-sensors and as photosensitizers in photodynamic therapy.
Are there any exciting case studies using this technology that you can share with us?
ZFN:
Principal Scientist, Head of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships
PartitionBio
As Head of Business Development and Scientific Partnerships at PartitionBio, Dr. Zehra Nizami leads external strategy, early access programs and partnerships to advance the company’s proprietary non-viral delivery platform, BubbleFect, toward R&D, preclinical and future clinical use. She also continues on as a principal scientist, undertaking R&D with her peers at PartitionBio as part of a collaborative team united by curiosity and discovery.
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.
Senior Science Writer
Technology Networks
Blake pens and edits breaking news, articles and features on a broad range of scientific topics with a focus on drug discovery and biopharma. He earned an honors degree in chemistry from the University of Surrey. Blake also holds an MSc in chemistry from the University of Southampton. His research project focused on the synthesis of novel fluorescent dyes often used as chemical/bio-sensors and as photosensitizers in photodynamic therapy.
What sets this innovation apart from current drug delivery solutions, such as viral delivery systems and LNPs?
ZFN:
Principal Scientist, Head of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships
PartitionBio
As Head of Business Development and Scientific Partnerships at PartitionBio, Dr. Zehra Nizami leads external strategy, early access programs and partnerships to advance the company’s proprietary non-viral delivery platform, BubbleFect, toward R&D, preclinical and future clinical use. She also continues on as a principal scientist, undertaking R&D with her peers at PartitionBio as part of a collaborative team united by curiosity and discovery.
One of the main highlights is the possibility of loading cargoes into our delivery system not possible with existing systems. We’d love to see more people use our system to introduce proteins, either as a functional enzyme or an antibody. Another key advantage is the safety profile, not being a virus or utilizing LNPs, we believe this system will enter the cells using a different mechanism, although this remains an open question in terms of what would happen in vivo. In cell culture, we find that our system enters by a cell “drinking” mechanism called macropinocytosis. As such, there may be a higher payload delivery into the cell.
Managing Director
PartitionBio
Dr Olaf Piepenburg has been managing director of PartitionBio since 2022. Between 2003 and 2018 he worked with Niall Armes as chief scientific officer of TwistDx Ltd on the development and commercialization of the recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) technology. Following his involvement with TwistDx, Pipenburg worked in senior positions in the private biotechnology sector (head of sequencing biochemistry at Base4 Ltd, head of molecular development at SenseBio Ltd), before joining the Scientific Operations department at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK as head of research.
Another feature of the technology is that these droplets are essentially self-organizing, so it's an extremely simple protocol to produce these. Basically, you take your cargo, for example RNA or protein, mix it with our reagent, and if there are the right salt conditions, the droplets spontaneously form. That is a marked contrast to nanoparticles, which require the controlled mixing of, often lipids, in an organic solvent with cargo in a liquid stream, typically using some form of microfluidics device. These nanoparticles, once formed, aren’t particularly stable, so must be shipped frozen. Other forms of lipid-based delivery vehicles don’t need a liquid device, but these are more akin to liposomes. We believe that the underlying biophysics of our droplets lend themselves to much easier protocols.
BF:
Senior Science Writer
Technology Networks
Blake pens and edits breaking news, articles and features on a broad range of scientific topics with a focus on drug discovery and biopharma. He earned an honors degree in chemistry from the University of Surrey. Blake also holds an MSc in chemistry from the University of Southampton. His research project focused on the synthesis of novel fluorescent dyes often used as chemical/bio-sensors and as photosensitizers in photodynamic therapy.
What are your aspirations for the impact of this technology in the future?
OP:
Managing Director
PartitionBio
Dr Olaf Piepenburg has been managing director of PartitionBio since 2022. Between 2003 and 2018 he worked with Niall Armes as chief scientific officer of TwistDx Ltd on the development and commercialization of the recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) technology. Following his involvement with TwistDx, Pipenburg worked in senior positions in the private biotechnology sector (head of sequencing biochemistry at Base4 Ltd, head of molecular development at SenseBio Ltd), before joining the Scientific Operations department at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK as head of research.
While BubbleFect is a life science tool right now, which we know works well in the lab, in the long term, we want this to be an in vivo delivery tool.
We hope our technology could contribute to making genetic medicines cheaper and more accessible to patients. I believe one way to combat the cost of genetic medicines is through developing better delivery technologies, and we are tapping into this new field of non-viral and non-LNP based delivery vehicles.
Principal Scientist, Head of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships
PartitionBio
As Head of Business Development and Scientific Partnerships at PartitionBio, Dr. Zehra Nizami leads external strategy, early access programs and partnerships to advance the company’s proprietary non-viral delivery platform, BubbleFect, toward R&D, preclinical and future clinical use. She also continues on as a principal scientist, undertaking R&D with her peers at PartitionBio as part of a collaborative team united by curiosity and discovery.
CRISPR-based therapies dominate the news and we think we have a unique platform to support them; CRISPR can be delivered as an RNA and DNA, but as a final complex is functional as a ribonucleoprotein, which is predominantly protein. This is an application where our system could really excel and it works in cell culture. We’ve already built partnerships with prominent CRISPR clinical labs in the US and our hope in the long run is to support CRISPR-based therapies.
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Senior Science Writer
Technology Networks
Blake pens and edits breaking news, articles and features on a broad range of scientific topics with a focus on drug discovery and biopharma. He earned an honors degree in chemistry from the University of Surrey. Blake also holds an MSc in chemistry from the University of Southampton. His research project focused on the synthesis of novel fluorescent dyes often used as chemical/bio-sensors and as photosensitizers in photodynamic therapy.
What does winning the 2025 ELRIG Innovation Award mean to you?
Managing Director
PartitionBio
Dr Olaf Piepenburg has been managing director of PartitionBio since 2022. Between 2003 and 2018 he worked with Niall Armes as chief scientific officer of TwistDx Ltd on the development and commercialization of the recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) technology. Following his involvement with TwistDx, Pipenburg worked in senior positions in the private biotechnology sector (head of sequencing biochemistry at Base4 Ltd, head of molecular development at SenseBio Ltd), before joining the Scientific Operations department at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK as head of research.
It’s great to get some recognition. It’s important for us because what we’ve experienced as a startup is that the investment climate is difficult and yet the in vivo aspirations we have require quite a lot of investment. The award is a great way for us to build awareness of our technology and its possibilities as we start to transition from our alpha to our beta program.
ZFN:
Principal Scientist, Head of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships
PartitionBio
As Head of Business Development and Scientific Partnerships at PartitionBio, Dr. Zehra Nizami leads external strategy, early access programs and partnerships to advance the company’s proprietary non-viral delivery platform, BubbleFect, toward R&D, preclinical and future clinical use. She also continues on as a principal scientist, undertaking R&D with her peers at PartitionBio as part of a collaborative team united by curiosity and discovery.
The Breakthrough Zone has been a great way for us to get an idea of how to exhibit at a scientific conference and ELRIG has been a supportive environment for that. Having the opportunity to pitch our technology in a 3-minute video was a great experience and it’s fantastic that we won the Innovation Award, as we now have the chance to present our innovation to academics, biotech researchers and drug developers all in one room.
