De-Min Zhu, Ph.D.

De-Min Zhu is the founder and CEO of Cureport, Inc. at Boston, a company inspiring in nanotechnologies. De-Min engaged himself in the innovations of lipid nanoparticles (LNP) for drug delivery in his decades of science and pharmaceutical careers. At Cureport, De-Min invented nPortTM nanotechnologies that represents the most robust platform process in the world for manufacturing all type of liposomal products with prices particle size control from 20 to 200nm, direct scalability from milligram o kilograms, homogeneous morphology and particle size, and robust reproducibility. Recently, De-Min created a revolutionary LNP development strategy and has made exciting breakthroughs in LNP formulations for RNA/DNA delivery. The innovative LNPs feature with more than 90% reduction in ionizable lipid content, more than 30 folds increase in mRNA transfection compared to the LNPs used in Covid-19 vaccines, and non-cytotoxicity.

De-Min completed his bachelor to Ph.D. educations in Chemistry at Peking University. His earlier professional careers include more than 10 years of cross disciplinary scholar research at NIH and Harvard Medical School in biochemistry, biophysics, immunology, and cancer research. De-Min then joined Merck and then Pfizer serving as team heads leading biopharmaceutical formulation/process development for vaccines, biologics, oligonucleotide therapeutics, and as a core scientist of the companies’ Science and Technology Committees for worldwide nanotechnology evaluation, due diligence, and licensing. At Pfizer De-Min invented the blanch tailed ionizable lipids for gene delivery, that design was utilized in the LNPs of the two FDA approved mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.

De-Min published more than 30 peer-reviewed research articles. The equation he developed at HMS became the classic analysis for the determination of two-dimensional binding constant (2D Kd) of protein receptors /ligands in the contact area of T cells and antigen-presenting cells, and was recognized as Zhu-Golan Equation in the literature and books.