10 Questions With… College of Pharmacy graduate student Antony Jozić and Gaurav Sahay, professor of pharmaceutical sciences, who together recently released a study on drug delivery and genetic therapy
Jozić:
What brought you to Oregon State?
I came to Oregon State as an undergraduate, honestly making a practical decision about where to get a strong education without taking on overwhelming debt. I didn't anticipate how much the environment would shape what I wanted to do with my career. The summer after my first year, I started volunteering in the Sahay Lab, and that experience changed everything. Seeing how lipid nanoparticles could be engineered to solve fundamental problems in gene delivery made me feel like I could make a real difference in the world of medicine. Staying on as a graduate student in the Sahay Lab just made sense.
Where did your interest in gene therapy originate?
It traces back to high school, where we spent a lot of time discussing the rise of CRISPR and the ethical questions surrounding it, things like “designer babies” and what it would mean to rewrite the human genome. Those conversations were equal parts exciting and unsettling, and they left me genuinely curious: How do you edit genes? And how do you get gene-editing tools precisely where they need to go inside a cell? Those questions pulled me toward pursuing gene therapy research in college.
What makes you passionate about higher education?
Higher education creates a rare space where you're expected to sit with hard problems and not let go of them. What I find most meaningful is that it connects curiosity to consequence. The questions we ask in the lab aren't always abstract; they have the potential to matter for patients living with diseases that currently have limited options.
How important is collaboration to your work?
Collaboration is central to everything we do. The Nature Biotechnology paper we just published is a good example. It involved researchers from OSU, OHSU, Tennessee Technological University, Yeungnam University in South Korea and the University of Brest in France. The ionizable lipids that turned out to be some of the most efficient we've tested came directly out of our partnership with chemists in France. No single lab has all the expertise needed to move this kind of science forward, so the ability to work across disciplines and across institutions is essential.
What advice would you give the younger version of yourself who was just starting college?
Get comfortable with not knowing things immediately. There’s a tendency early on to feel like you need to have everything figured out such as your career path, your life plan, your identity. But a lot of the most important developments in my own trajectory came from following genuine curiosity rather than a predetermined plan. I started college with a plan to go to medical school, then grappled with switching to a computer science major, and finally stuck with a biochemistry and molecular biology degree with a focus on bioinformatics. My advice is to take the class that interest you even if it doesn't fit neatly into your major. Talk to researchers and professionals whose work excites you.
What impact do you believe your discoveries might have on human health?
I believe our discoveries have broad implications for human health. If you can deliver genetic medicine efficiently and at lower doses, you open the door to safer treatments for genetic disorders, cancers and other diseases. The lysosomal barcoding system we developed also gives the field a new measurement tool, which matters because you really can't improve what you can't measure. We're also working on more efficient methods of delivery to the lung, eye and brain, which could eventually change how diseases like cystic fibrosis, blindness and Alzheimer’s are treated.
What has been your favorite course in college?
Applied bioinformatics, nanomedicine and molecular biology stand out as the most formative. At the time I was taking them, I was genuinely interested in them and didn't think about how directly they would feed into my research, but all three ended up being foundational. The molecular biology coursework gave me the mechanistic understanding needed to develop the next-generation sequencing workflows central to my research. The bioinformatics training shaped how I think about analyzing complex biological data. Nanomedicine gave me a rigorous framework for understanding how nanoparticles behave in biological systems. They were exactly the preparation needed for graduate school, even if I couldn't have predicted that at the time.
What challenges or opportunities were present for you when leading a research project as a graduate student?
Leading the work that became our Nature Biotechnology paper was one of the most demanding and rewarding experiences of my graduate career. The central challenge was technical, developing a rapid in vivo endosomal escape quantification system that had never been done before meant a lot of iteration and uncertainty. There were stretches where results weren't pointing in a clear direction, and I had to develop a tolerance for the ambiguity while keeping the broader goal in view. The opportunity side of it was that I got to be deeply involved in every layer of the project, from experimental design to working with international collaborators. That kind of ownership over a project at the graduate level is something I've come to see as a real gift.
What is your next step in your research?
A lot of what comes next is about extending what we've learned. The lysosomal barcoding platform we developed for tracking nanoparticle behavior in the liver has real potential to be adapted for other tissues. The lung is a particularly exciting target, given the work we've done on aerosolized LNPs for diseases like cystic fibrosis. More broadly, I want to keep refining our understanding of what makes a lipid nanoparticle truly efficient, so we can design delivery systems that are not just more potent but also more precise in where they act and how they're tolerated by the body.
What is your favorite nonacademic pursuit or passion?
There's something about rock climbing that appeals to me in a similar way that research does, in that you're faced with a problem that requires a high degree of mental engagement, and rock climbing is a huge part of my life outside academia. It's also a good reminder that failure is part of the process, which is useful in the lab. The adage in climbing is “If you’re not falling, you’re not trying hard enough.”
Sahay:
What do you find most rewarding about conducting high level research with graduate students?
What I find most rewarding is building a team environment where students realize they can tackle important questions—and succeed together. We focus on creating a milieu that combines the right tools, shared learning and a culture of collaboration.
Antony’s journey is especially meaningful to me. He started with us as an undergraduate —curious, driven and eager to learn. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of watching him grow into a scientist who not only mastered the tools but pushed them further than we had imagined. When we set out to address a long-standing challenge in our field understanding endosomal escape, he was ready, and he delivered in a way that truly moved the field forward. Seeing that transformation, from learning to leading, is incredibly rewarding.
