Development of drug delivery nanoparticles for treating chronic total occlusions in micro-robot system

摘要

Chronic total occlusion (CTO) has been recognized as a severe cardiovascular disease, which is characterized by complete obstructions or blockages of an artery with thrombus and calcified lipid or proteins. Thus, the effective clinical treatment of CTO requires both mechanical drilling to the calcified lesion and chemical treatments to thrombus and injured vessel tissues. The overall goal of our project is to develop a micro-robot based platform to address current problems in treating CTO. Given that, the ideal delivery carrier encapsulating pharmacological chemicals with abilities to degrade thrombus and to facilitate the regeneration of injured vessel tissues should be integrated within the micro-robot system. In this study, we developed nanoparticles based on two biocompatible polymers, which can be integrated in the micro-robot system, presenting nanoparticles as a platform to deliver pharmaceutical agents to complement mechanical treatment of CTO. The size distribution of PLLA nanoparticles was from 164 to 190 nm and showed circular shape, independently. In addition, gelatin nanoparticles showed the size of 195 nm in diameter. Our results suggest that the PLLA and gelatin nanoparticles may hold great promise as a drug delivery carrier for treating CTO integrating with micro-robot system after drug incorporation and functional modification.