James Dahlman

Assistant Professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

The Lab for Precision Therapies at Georgia Tech, also called the ‘Dahlman Lab’, works at the interface of drug delivery, nanotechnology, genomics, and gene editing. James has designed nanoparticles that deliver RNAs to the lung, heart, and tumors; these nanoparticles have been used by over ten labs across the US to date. He has also developed targeted in vivo combination therapies; nanoparticles deliver multiple therapeutic RNAs at once, in order to manipulate several nodes on a single disease pathway. For example, he concurrently delivered two therapeutic RNAs for combination cancer therapy. More recently, he developed a method to quantify the targeting, biodistribution, and pharmacokinetics of dozens to hundreds of distinct nanoparticles at once directly in vivo.
Finally, James uses molecular biology to rationally design the genetic drugs he delivers. He recently reported ‘dead’ guide RNAs; these engineered RNAs can be used to simultaneously up- and down-regulate different genes in a single cell using Cas9, and have been used to study cancer therapy resistance pathways.