Theoretical Considerations for the Potential of Controlled Drug Release from Lipid Vesicles by Means of Electroporation or Electrofusion

摘要

Lipid vesicles can be used to encapsulate a certain drug and deliver it to target cells in the body by intravenous or oral administration. Their main role is to protect, either the encapsulated drug from the surrounding environment or the organism from the toxic effects of the drug. However, once the vesicles are delivered into the target cells, their content needs to be released. In this paper we use numerical modeling to explore the possibility of using short-duration high-voltage electric pulses for inducing a fast and controlled release of the vesicle content. Namely, electric pulses with appropriate duration and strength cause permeabilization of a lipid membrane through phenomenon known as electroporation. Additionally, electroporation is also accompanied by membrane fusogenic state, making it possible to fuse the vesicles with the cell membrane. Our results demonstrate that both intracellular vesicle electroporation and cell-vesicle electrofusion seem to be feasible approaches when using 10 ns pulses resulting in sufficiently high electric field strength.