Kristen Dellinger: Turning Tiny Milk Vesicles into a Big Breakthrough for Brain DiseaseSustainable Fibers, Reimagined from the Molecule Up
The turning point for Dr. Kristen Dellinger did not occur in a lab, but after a series of seemingly independent events.
Five years ago, her father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The questions came instantly—fear, confusion, a rush to understand what the diagnosis meant. And like families often do, they turned to the person with “doctor” in her title. “They kept saying, ‘Explain this to us—you’re a doctor,’” she recalled. “And I kept saying, ‘I’m not that kind of doctor.’ But I wanted to understand what he was going through. That became personal for me.”
At the same time, Dr. Dellinger was surrounded by a cluster of researchers at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T) who professionally converged around the shared question of neurological health—biologists, nurses, engineers, chemists, and data scientists. Then, one of Dellinger’s own students began asking hard questions about the glioblastoma—an aggressive and malignant brain tumor— and wanted to understand why brain diseases are so difficult to treat.
“It was a perfect storm,” she said. “My personal life, my students, the community at NC A&T. All of it pushed me toward asking what we could contribute to this problem.”
That answer began taking shape when she started digging into research on extracellular vesicles—tiny lipid bubbles that cells release to communicate with one another.
“They’re like little envelopes,” she said. “They carry proteins, DNA, RNA. They can deliver messages, but they also help the cell take out its trash.” To an engineer with years of nanoparticle delivery research—someone who once worked to encapsulate oral insulin—it was a clue.
Dr. Dellinger said, “I’d already been thinking about drug delivery at these scales. If vesicles already cross the blood–brain barrier on their own, they could also be used as a vehicle for carrying something therapeutic with them.”
The blood-brain barrier, she explains, is like a castle—walled, guarded, fiercely selective. Only certain trusted messengers can cross the drawbridge. Extracellular vesicles hold the potential to be one of those trusted messengers.
The next leap in her work came from an unexpected place: cow’s milk.
Extracellular vesicles exist in all bodily fluids—blood, saliva, and even tears. But milk contains them in abundance, and unlike cell cultures grown in a lab, it offers something rare in drug development: scale.
“Milk is a rich, renewable source of extracellular vesicles,” she said. “It’s affordable. Accessible. And we have a dairy farm right here at North Carolina A&T.”
Most labs isolate vesicles from cultured cells, a process that is slow, expensive, and difficult to scale. Milk changes the economics entirely. With proper engineering, it could support high-volume production of consistent vesicles—an essential requirement for any therapy that hopes to reach patients.
And the long-term vision is even more transformational: an oral drug-delivery platform that uses these vesicles as the carrier. No injections. No invasive procedures. Potentially no systemic toxicity.
“Many of us drink milk anyway,” she said. “So why not explore a delivery system that works with something the body already knows how to handle?”
If the concept seems elegant, the execution is anything but.
Extracellular vesicles are notoriously challenging to isolate in a pure, reproducible form. To become a viable drug-delivery system, they must be separated from milk with incredible precision—consistent sizes, consistent behavior, consistent batches.
“It’s one of the biggest scientific hurdles,” Dellinger said. “Biological nanoparticles have a mind of their own. Getting batch-to-batch consistency is very difficult.”
Her team is developing scalable isolation methods, optimizing biopolymers for filtration and pushing toward the stringent reproducibility required by future FDA review.
This is where NCInnovation changed the trajectory of the project.
With NCI support, her lab gained the resources to systematically address the technical barriers. More importantly, Dellinger gained something she did not expect: a shift in mindset.
“In academia, you think about papers and grants,” she said. “But with NCInnovation, we’re talking about commercialization. About IP. About what it takes for a company to pick this up.”
Since receiving NCI funding, her team has submitted three provisional patents—with two more underway. They are Dellinger’s only patent filings at North Carolina A&T, and they came directly from the work NCI enabled.
Her students have absorbed the shift, too. “They hear me meeting with our Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR), talking with NCInnovation, planning disclosures. They’re learning what it looks like to turn research into something real.”
The Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering (JSNN), where her lab is based, is one of the most interdisciplinary research environments in the state. Physicists work alongside chemists; electrical engineers share space with materials scientists.
It’s the kind of place where an engineering graduate student puzzled by data from a Raman spectrometer will knock on a physicist’s door rather than struggle alone.
“That’s the beauty of working at the nanoscale,” she said. “Everything intersects—chemistry, physics, biology. That mindset shapes how we approach every part of this project.”
When Dellinger envisions the next 10 to 15 years, she doesn’t picture a single therapy. She imagines a world where treatments for neurological diseases become personalized—where EV-based delivery systems can be tailored to a patient’s own biology and the exact stage of their disease.
“One day, neurological disease could be monitored like blood sugar,” she said. “Real-time. Adjusted as it progresses.”
And the potential extends far beyond neurodegeneration. Evidence suggests that EV-based delivery could one day support treatments for cancers, autoimmune disorders, and other diseases shaped by cellular communication.
For Dellinger, the motivation returns to where it began.
“My goal isn’t just to publish,” she said. “It’s to make a meaningful contribution—to help people. To create something that moves out of the lab and actually benefits families like mine.”
That’s why NCInnovation’s focus on commercialization resonates so deeply. The teamwork with her co-PI, Dr. Jeffrey Alston, EIR guidance from Dr. Charles Pemble, the hands-on support from senior regional innovation network director Louis Judge , hub director Lakeya Hardy and the expectations around IP strategy—all of it shapes the work toward a future where her research doesn’t stay in the walls of JSNN.
“There’s something unique about NCI,” she said. “It changes the way you think. It keeps you focused on the impact beyond the bench. And that’s inspiring—for me and for my students.”
