Home > Press > Designing Nanomaterials for Drug Delivery
Confocal laser scanning microscopy images of the protein-based nanoparticles incubated with breast cancer cells. |
Abstract:
Natural biological entities have been highly successful in fabricating nanoscale structures and functional systems, leading to scientific exploration of biologically inspired strategies for materials design. In particular, protein-based materials can combine natural properties, structural elements, and biologically reactive sites to obtain self-assembled nanoarchitectures with applications including tissue engineering, nanomaterials synthesis, and drug delivery. However, the functionality of these materials can be limited by the locations or absence of specific chemical conjugation sites.
To circumvent this limitation, an investigation by Ren et al., at the University of California, Irvine, implemented a novel, non-covalent strategy to attach guest molecules into a protein-based nanocapsule. Their biomimetic inspiration was multi-drug efflux transporters, which bind a remarkably broad range of structurally-divergent molecules using phenylalanine, a hydrophobic amino acid. Through protein engineering, the team introduced targeted non-native phenylalanines into the hollow cavity of a caged protein scaffold.
The transformed nanoparticles enabled the antitumor drug doxorubicin to bind to the cavity at high loading capacities. These drug-protein complexes could subsequently be applied to induce death in breast cancer cells. Significantly, this work demonstrates a generalized strategy to engineer binding domains within protein-based materials that does not rely on conventional chemical coupling, thus extending the potential functionality of such materials.
Source: University of California, Irvine
####
For more information, please click here
Copyright © Wiley-VCH Materials Science Journals
If you have a comment, please Contact us.Issuers of news releases, not 7th Wave, Inc. or Nanotechnology Now, are solely responsible for the accuracy of the content.
Related News Press |
News and information
Simulating magnetization in a Heisenberg quantum spin chain April 5th, 2024
NRL charters Navy’s quantum inertial navigation path to reduce drift April 5th, 2024
Discovery points path to flash-like memory for storing qubits: Rice find could hasten development of nonvolatile quantum memory April 5th, 2024
Nanomedicine
New micromaterial releases nanoparticles that selectively destroy cancer cells April 5th, 2024
Good as gold - improving infectious disease testing with gold nanoparticles April 5th, 2024
Researchers develop artificial building blocks of life March 8th, 2024
Discoveries
Chemical reactions can scramble quantum information as well as black holes April 5th, 2024
New micromaterial releases nanoparticles that selectively destroy cancer cells April 5th, 2024
Utilizing palladium for addressing contact issues of buried oxide thin film transistors April 5th, 2024
Announcements
NRL charters Navy’s quantum inertial navigation path to reduce drift April 5th, 2024
Discovery points path to flash-like memory for storing qubits: Rice find could hasten development of nonvolatile quantum memory April 5th, 2024
The latest news from around the world, FREE | ||
Premium Products | ||
Only the news you want to read!
Learn More |
||
Full-service, expert consulting
Learn More |
||