Scientists at the University of California, San Diego have devised a unique method of masking nanoparticles as red blood cells in order to supply cancer-curing drugs directly into a tumor by evading the body's immune system.
As per the method, the red blood cell’s membrane is wrapped on a biodegradable polymer nanoparticle containing a mix of compact molecule drugs. The size of the nanoparticles is below 100 nm, which is equivalent to the size of a virus.
According to Liangfang Zhang, who serves as a nanoengineering professor at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and Moores UCSD Cancer Center, it is the first time the membrane of a natural cell is coupled with a synthetic nanoparticle for delivering drugs. Che-Ming Hu, a student of Zhang, commented that the red blood cells are nature’s long-lived delivery vehicle with a lifetime of roughly 180 days.
Nowadays, stealth nanoparticles are coated with synthetic substances such as polyethylene glycol that forms a safety layer to evade the immune system, which provides adequate time to the nanoparticles to deliver the drugs. However, in Zhang's investigation, nanoparticles coated with the red blood cells’ membranes survived in the laboratory mice bodies for roughly two days.
Nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems can deliver chemotherapy drugs within few minutes. This considerably enhances the comfort level of the cancer-affected patients. This innovation opens the way for highly customized drug delivery systems in which the blood sample of a patient is used for the production of the required membranes to mask the nanoparticle, avoiding the hazard of immune response almost completely.
Zhang stated that the one of the further developments is to design a method for producing the biomimetic nanoparticles in large scale for clinical purpose. National Science Foundation will fund the research. Scientists will also incorporate a targeting molecule into the membrane that will allow the nanoparticle to search and attach to cancer-affected cells, allowing the delivery of multiple drugs at a single time.
Source: http://www.ucsd.edu