Nanocontainers for drugs dressed up in the "skin" of platelets
A team of scientists from the USA has learned how to cover polymer nanoparticles with a platelet membrane from human blood. This modification provided effective masking of nanoparticles from the immune system, and also increased selective adhesion on damaged areas of blood vessels. The study is published in Nature (Hu et al., Nanoparticle biointerfacing by platelet membrane cloaking).
The authors coated nanoparticles from a biodegradable polymer with a platelet plasma membrane. The resulting structures were tested for an immune response and the ability to adhere to damaged tissues. In addition, experiments on rats tested the applicability of nanoparticles as a means for drug delivery.
Modification of nanoparticles led to a weakening of the protective reaction both in experiments with macrophages and in the case of complement system proteins. It also turned out that the platelet membrane causes nanoparticles to selectively adsorb on damaged fragments of blood vessels.
Diagram from the press release Targeted drug delivery with these nanoparticles can make medicines more effective – VM.
Since some pathogenic bacteria are adsorbed on platelets (for example, to "hide" from the immune system), the authors checked whether such a function was preserved in modified nanoparticles. To do this, they were incubated with a culture of staphylococcus. It turned out that twelve times more bacteria stick to the modified nanoparticles than to the "naked" ones.
Drug delivery is one of the most popular areas of nanotechnology today. Micelles, liposomes, polyelectrolyte capsules, even metal nanoparticles are most often suggested to be used as "containers". However, one of the main problems remains the immune response that such bodies cause. Previously, they were tried to mask them with platelet antigens, but this method was significantly less effective than the modification described in the new work.
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21.09.2015