Yeast cell wall particles: a promising class of nature-inspired microcarriers for multimodal imaging

摘要

Nature has strongly inspired the search for carriers able to allow a safe delivery of a high number of diagnostic or therapeutic chemicals to a given biological target. For instance, liposomes, one of the most used nanocarriers for drug delivery purposes, are composed of phospholipids that are reminiscent of the natural components of cell membranes. Besides the great benefits primarily related to the improvement of the pharma-cokinetic properties and therapeutic index of a drug, the use of naturally-occurring carriers has been also considered for enhancing the detection threshold of imaging agents, especially for those modalities, like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which are intrinsically characterized by a relatively poor sensitivity. In addition to liposomes,1 many other nature-like carriers have been investigated so far including proteins,2,6 virus capsids,7'8 lipoproteins9,10 and even whole cells have been used, primarily for cell-tracking purposes."