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Better Targeting Disease with Nanoparticles

Nanoparticles, which are popular candidates for ferrying drugs to target locations in the human body, have been shown to evade the immune system and infiltrate tissues and cells. This makes them effective in delivering medication for conditions such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. But, Michigan Engineering Professor Lola Eniola-Adefeso and her team have discovered that they are not good at leaving the bloodstream, getting trapped instead by red blood cells. To combat that, researchers are exploring the possibility of different shapes and sizes for these nanoparticles, to help them more effectively navigate to their targets.

Topics:
Drug Delivery Medical Nanotechnology

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:02 majority of the issue with cancer treatment today is linked to the side effect associated with injecting uh Cancer drugs into the bloodstream if we can design particles that essentially act as robots once we inject them they are intelligent enough to go to based on our design to the location that we want them to and only go there uh we now have much great opportunity to use many of

    00:00:31 the therapies that we uh frankly cannot use right now because of toxicity localize it uh get full impact while uh diminishing uh side effects in other location that is my ultimate goal that we can use some of our systems to begin to predict customized uh design of drug delivery system to specific location in the body associated with specific disease um in the body okay all these

    00:00:57 big things here are endothelial cells and these little white circles here are drug carriers that have stuck to the wall so the lab is interested in asking the question how do drug carrier system navigate the bloodstream since many of them are designed to bind to the blood vessel wall they need to do that to get out of the bloodstream to go into the tissue

    00:01:20 space where you want to deliver drugs so for example in arosc rois you would want to design a drug carrier or Imaging system to bind the blood vessel walls in in arteries whether you want to image the arterial wall or you want to deliver drug inside the plat one way or the other you need contact the blood vessel wall we find that red blood cells which make up about 99% of uh cells in the

    00:01:43 blood are very critical into how particles and other cells distribute in a blood vessel spherical particles that are less than one micrometer in diameter seem to be trapped within the center of blood flow which is a problem because that means majority of them will not contact the blood vessel wall this is particularly important in large vessels and so when we talk about cardiovascular

    00:02:08 disease atherosclerosis then this this might actually be problematic in the sense that nanop particles that we like to use uh for many of the reasons including that they're very small they can easily go throughout bloodstream actually are not able to come down from the Red Cell core for vascular targeting the other key discoveries that we're making is how shape might be able

    00:02:34 to play a role so again nanospheres may not come down but what if we have nanor rods okay or Nano disc do they Fair better in some instances the answer is yes when you have a rod shape you might actually do better coming out of the bloodstream to the wall than a sphere so we're essentially integrating all the physical molecular characteristics of drug delery system that allows them to

    00:03:01 perform the job that we're designing them to do the heart beats it actually beats quite quite violently as we've been able to see through surgeries this beating creates vibration inside the chest cavity and so we're able to take